ABSTRACT
Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles in 1964. His first novel Less Than Zero (1985) was already a bestseller by the time he graduated from Bennington College and it made him very wealthy:
I made an enormous amount of money and I moved to Manhattan and I sort of got sucked up into this whole yuppie-mania that was going on at that time and I think in a lot of ways, working on American Psycho was my way of fighting against slipping into a certain kind of lifestyle. [. . .] And so when I moved here, I started meeting a lot of young guys who were working on Wall St and I thought, great, here’s the perfect takeoff point for what I want to do; it’s about money, it’s about hollow money, it’s about how can these kids be making these enormous sums of money during this time. [. . .] I knew a lot of friends
at Bennington whose brothers were making a fortune on Wall St and just living the whole 80’s life and so I hung out with these guys for about two weeks because I wanted to find out what exactly people were doing. Now of course we know they’re in jail, and so I know now why they couldn’t talk about certain things, why they didn’t take me to their offices, why they weren’t extremely clear cut about what exactly their jobs entailed, how they were making so much money, etc. [. . .] At the end of the day, it was always meet at Harry’s, meet the new bimbo they’re dating, what’s the hippest restaurant, talk about buying a car, talk about houses in the Hamptons they wanted to rent, which club they go to, where their dealer was, buying suits, clothes, trips, etc. So after two exhausting weeks of hanging out with these people, I understood that my narrator would be a serial killer. I don’t know where I made the connection; it just seemed logical that one of these guys would be driven so nuts by how status obsessed everyone is, that it would incite him into becoming a murderer.
