Brat Pack Literary

The "literary Brat Pack" was a term created by the media to refer to a group of young authors in the 1980s. Labelled the "literary brat pack" in a 1987 article in the Village Voice, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz were presented as the new face of literature: young, iconoclastic and fresh. In many ways, this nickname was meant pejoratively, as the accompanying article pictured faces of the three pasted onto cut-outs of babies in diapers. Yet their impact on literature and their vast popularity rendered this nickname an affectionate branding of the new wave of young minimalist authors. Each presented a particular challenge to established literary criticism: McInerney's debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was told entirely in second-person singular, a groundbreaking mechanism. Janowitz's Slaves of New York explored themes of sexual politics against a backdrop of New York's peculiarities rendered honestly, and Ellis's Less Than Zero chronicled a post-adolescent disconnect with society that seemed shocking and pathological.