In 1985, when Bret Easton Ellis burst onto the best-seller list
with his first novel, Less Than Zero,
he was just 21 years old. The novel’s corrosive account of debauchery among
privileged Los Angeles teens touched a nerve with the New Wave generation, and,
in the wake of its success, Ellis plunged into the heart of another, even more
decadent situation — New York City in the 1980s.
Welcomed at every chic new restaurant and lured nightly to
drug-fueled parties that lasted until after the sun came up, Ellis encountered
a world where the provocative transgressions of his high school and college
chums paled in comparison to the escapades of an even more uninhibited
generation of privileged adults.
The inspiration for American
Psycho, which remains his best-known work, came at a private dinner party in
the late ’80s featuring a guest list drawn from Wall Street’s young elite.
Looking around and listening to his amped-up companions as they speed-talked
about fashion, money, and sex, Ellis reimagined the manuscript he had been
working on as the diary of a serial killer.