Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis was born in 1964 and grew up in a middle-class family in southern California. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and Ellis early-on cited his father as an inspiration for the “American Psycho” himself. (He later revised these statements, staying that he actually drew more on himself for inspiration.) Ellis studied music at Bennington College in Vermont before moving towards writing and releasing his acclaimed first novel, Less Than Zero, at the age of 21. Though the initial controversy surrounding American Psycho somewhat stalled the rise of his career, the book’s later elevation to cult classic and growing academic interest has secured Ellis’s position as a significant contemporary American writer. In the years since American Psycho, he has written several other novels and screenplays, including a film adaptation of his own novel The Informers and the 2012 independent film The Canyons, which starred Lindsay Lohan. Several of his novels, including American Psycho, have been adapted into films. Throughout Ellis’s career, he has largely deflected questions regarding his sexuality, but after receiving backlash for a series of tweets in which he criticized Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign, he came out publicly as a gay man.