Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is a bisexual American author. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. He has called himself a moralist, although he is one of his generation's most controversial authors because of his graphic prose style. Influenced by French social realists like Flaubert and Balzac, Ellis updates those novelists' themes of youthful ennui, materialism, status obsession, and social trangression; he also employs their technique of linking novels with common, recurring characters. His dystopic locales typically make use of large, dense cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Paris.