Frequently disliked by reviewers, faulted for his youth and apparent disregard for political correctness, Bret Easton Ellis was the enfant terrible of 1980s fiction. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), became a national best-seller when Ellis was just twenty-one years old, and he published American Psycho (1991) when he was only twenty-seven. Though he tends to court controversy and to polarize his critics, he has earned a more substantial critical reception than other "brat pack" writers such as Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney, with whom he was often associated in the early 1980s. While some consider his novels to be little more than sociological documents, Ellis successfully adapts contemporary multimedia aesthetics to the novel form and, in the process, offers an unrepentant portrait of a generation that has resisted easy categorization. Dominated by popular culture, drugs, and Ronald Reagan-era materialistic excess, his work enjoys a youthful cult following, in...