Back to ground zero

BRET EASTON ELLIS was 19 when he wrote Less Than Zero, a coruscating account of disaffected youth in his hometown, Los Angeles.

He was 21 when the book was published, in 1985, to wide acclaim. It sold 50,000 copies in its first year, and was adapted (in an admittedly unrecognisable form) as a movie, in 1987, starring Robert Downey Jnr and featuring an unknown Brad Pitt as an extra.

Ellis was a sensation, the head boy, along with his friend, Jay McInerney, of America’s literary brat pack of the 1980s. He followed it up with The Rules of Attraction, hewn from his days studying for a music degree at Bennington, the exclusive, bohemian university in Vermont on which his college friend, Donna Tartt, based her novel, The Secret History.