Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote about many of the same issues six decades earlier. Like Fitzgerald, however, Ellis and McInerney failed to translate their literary gifts onto the big screen, and battled for years to prove wrong those who had deemed their bestselling debuts as mere publishing flukes.
Born in Los Angeles in 1964, Ellis grew up in a relatively affluent household headed by his father, who sold real estate. The family lived in Sherman Oaks, one of the innumerable suburbs of California's San Fernando Valley, but his upbringing was far from idyllic. Ellis recalled in an interview with Scott Martelle of the Los Angeles Times that his father, who died in 1992, drank and was at times abusive. "There's a lot of anxiety growing up with a parent like that," he told Martelle. As a college student, Ellis began to vent some of his frustrations through fiction.
The somewhat autobiographical Less than Zero grew out of a writing project Ellis began at Bennington College under his professor, writer Joe McGinniss, author of the 1983 best seller Fatal Vision. Comprised of vignettes about his high school experiences in the more affluent quarters of Los Angeles, the book centers on Clay, an eighteen-year-old freshman at an eastern college who returns to his hometown for Christmas vacation.
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