In 1985, twenty-one-year-old Bret Easton Ellis jolted the literary world with his first novel, Less than Zero, and was hailed by more than one critic as the voice of the new generation. His subsequent books failed to garner the accolades heaped on this debut, and some were even savaged by critics. Perhaps what made Ellis's success with Less than Zero all the more remarkable was the fact that he was still a college student at the time of the novel's publication. The book's launch party was held at Limelight, a trendy Manhattan nightclub of the era, and Ellis enjoyed a period as one of the new enfants terrible of the literary scene. Both he and another young writer, Jay McInerney, whose Bright Lights, Big City was also hailed as tour de force of the manners and morals of the young, privileged class of the 1980s, were often written about...