Born on 7 March 1964 in Los Angeles, California, Ellis was the firstborn son of Robert Martin Ellis, a real-estate analyst, and homemaker Dale Ellis. While other children played with toys, Ellis began to write instead, creating stories as Christmas presents. A self-described "valley boy," Ellis adopted the lifestyle of the wealthy and young in Los Angeles, touring the malls and spending time with his two sisters. His parents divorced during his teenage years. While attending the private Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, Ellis discovered Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and decided to read all of his works. Hemingway and Joan Didion, another early favorite, both supplied a visible influence on the stripped-down style of Ellis's first novel, Less Than Zero. Like Didion, Ellis used the techniques of new journalism, blurring traditional boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. As Ellis said during an interview in Reasons to Believe: New Voices in American Fiction (1988), "I like posing situations and questions, and having people react to them. I'm not a psychologist or sociologist. I feel that, in lots of ways, what I'm doing is documenting much more than answering questions or giving reasons why people misbehave in this fashion." This reportorial detachment and lack of a judgmental overview left Ellis open to critical attacks against immorality in his works.
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