1964 to today.
Seven periods: the Valley, Bennington, the Brat Pack years, the American Psycho affair, Glamorama, Lunar Park and Hollywood, the podcast years.
The Valley
Born 7 March in Los Angeles. Raised in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, the suburb that becomes the ground of nearly every book.
The Buckley School, Sherman Oaks. Cinema, new wave records, a first attempt at writing. The years he will return to, forty years later, in The Shards.
Leaves California for Bennington College, Vermont.
Bennington
Bennington College. Among his classmates: Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem. A workshop culture that produces a generation of novelists at once.
Less Than Zero is published by Simon & Schuster. Ellis is twenty-one. Immediate bestseller, immediate label: the voice of a blank generation.
Graduates from Bennington and moves to New York.
The literary Brat Pack
The Rules of Attraction. Camden College is Bennington barely disguised; Sean Bateman, brother of Patrick, appears for the first time.
Marek Kanievska's film of Less Than Zero reaches the screen. Ellis will keep his distance from it for the rest of his life.
New York. The press files him with Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz under a label none of the three chose: the literary Brat Pack.
American Psycho
Excerpts leak. Simon & Schuster cancels publication weeks before the release date; Ellis keeps the advance.
American Psycho is published by Vintage Books. Boycott called by the National Organization for Women, death threats, a decade of critical quarantine.
The Informers: thirteen linked stories, several written before Less Than Zero.
Glamorama & the dark years
Glamorama. Models, bombs, and a film crew that is always already in the room. The longest and most paranoid of the novels.
Mary Harron's American Psycho, with Christian Bale. The film reframes the novel as satire and rehabilitates it.
Roger Avary adapts The Rules of Attraction, the adaptation Ellis has said he likes.
Death of Michael Wade Kaplan, his partner. Lunar Park is dedicated to him.
Lunar Park & Hollywood
Lunar Park. A narrator named Bret Easton Ellis, a haunted suburban house, a father who will not stay buried.
Return to Los Angeles after two decades in New York.
Imperial Bedrooms: Clay comes back, twenty-five years on, as a screenwriter.
The Canyons, an original screenplay directed by Paul Schrader with Lindsay Lohan. Launch of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.
The podcast years
White, his first book of non-fiction: Generation X, the films of his adolescence, and the moral tone of the 2010s.
From 6 September 2020, and for a year, Ellis reads The Shards chapter by chapter on his own podcast, before any publisher sees it.
The Shards is published as a novel, thirteen years after the previous one, and a return to 1981.
The Shards reaches the screen on FX, eight episodes, created by Ellis and run with Ryan Murphy. He had spent 2023 and 2024 developing it at HBO before it was shelved.
Lives in Los Angeles. The podcast is in its ninth season.