Twenty-five years after it was first published, American Psycho is now a canonical work of social satire, widely regarded by gender theorists and feminist critics alike as a scabrous assessment of modern masculinity run amok. Time has proven a better friend to the book. Ellis himself became the most divisive figure in the literary world this side of Salman Rushdie. The National Organization for Women threatened a boycott of Random House, at least one executive at Vintage Books received death threats, and Germany banned the work outright. As a literary offering, American Psycho found few defenders-most notably Norman Mailer, a man who had made a fine career courting controversy-but Roger Rosenblatt of the New York Times spoke for most critics when he called the book “the most loathsome offering of the season.” As a cultural referendum, the decision was even more decisive. The publication of the novel did not initially prove sweet vindication for Ellis. By the time the novel finally arrived in bookstores after Vintage Books, a division of Random House, brazenly purchased the rights, bootleg copies of the manuscript had been floating around for months, filling the news with snippets of the sadistic behavior of the book’s protagonist (and said psycho), Patrick Bateman.
The previous fall, Simon & Schuster told the hotshot author he could keep his $300,000 advance for a book they absolutely refused to publish.
And yet the advance notice didn’t prevent the controversy surrounding Bret Easton Ellis’s infamous novel from blossoming into full-blown outrage when it was published in the spring of 1991. As trigger warnings go, it’s hard to imagine what more an author might do than title his book American Psycho.
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