I don't like bragging. Really, I don't. But it's a funny story. My cousin, Annette (not real name) lives out of the country, and is fairly good friends with Whit Stilman's daughter. So, she gossips with her a lot about the highbrow folks who have part-ays with her family. One day, they got on the subject of American Psycho, and how she wanted to see it when it came out. Annette's friend started talking about Bret Easton Ellis, and how he was a "mean drunk that nobody liked." Yeah, yeah, that was a useless boring story.

On a more factual note, Ellis wrote a lot of novels about rich, white, coke addicts doing lots of very tasteless stuff. However, he also wrote The Rules Of Attraction, about rich "bohemians" at college, swapping sex partners, and American Psycho, a book about a successful, attractive coke addict who kills other people for fun. Traits include: disaffected narrating, lots of gore, lots of "shocking events" and general disdain for the reader. You can love him, hate him, or find him boring. Most famous for Less Than Zero, the aforementioned Psycho, and Glamorama.
Born in 1964, and published his first novel at the age of 23, Ellis is the prominent moralist of last century, along with Don Delillo.

In my opinion, Ellis is the master of monologue in novel. Except Glamorama, all his books are mammoth monologues of some sense. American Psycho is the neverending monologue of the infamous Patrick Bateman, Rules of Attraction is a collection of monologues of different people telling the same story by their own perspective, and Less Than Zero is the monologue of a underaged guy inbetween cocaine addicts.

Ellis is also very succesful in linking books into each other by small crossovers. Actually, his books can be regarded as stories that look at cross sections of a generation. In Rules of Attraction we meet Patrick Bateman, who is the brother of one of the main characters. In Glamorama, we meet him for 5 seconds at a bar where he is trying to hide his blood stained clothes from his friends. If Less Than Zero is high school years, and Rules of Attraction college, then American Psycho and Glamorama tells how these people become adults.

Published books:

Less Than Zero (1985)
The Rules of Attraction (1987)
American Psycho (1991)
The Informers (1994)
Glamorama (1999)

Ellis often re-uses characters and settings across novels:

Haven't read The Informers and Glamorama yet, so the info (or lack thereof) regarding those two is secondhand. Please /msg me if you have anything to add.

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