The lower you walked through Manhattan toward the Twin Towers at night, the darker it got. Cabs didn’t like to go below 14^th Street. Beyond the punks at CBGB’s on the Bowery, the Mudd Club on White Street, or the Paradise Garage on King Street, it was hard to know who or what was lurking down the next block. But the glowing red sign at 145 West Broadway—”The Odeon” on one side, “Cafeteria” on the other—stuck out in the sea of black. Outside it was all bright neon sunshine. Inside, the lighting was perfect for all of the beautiful people.

On any given night in the early days of the Reagan years, the Odeon was bound to host a mix of characters: Saturday Night Live cast members, young Wall Street bulls, David Bowie, models galore. Often the young writer Tama Janowitz, fresh off the release of her first novel, American Dad, would head to the restaurant with her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol thought she was “kooky,” but she fit in with his pretty young things and up-and-coming art world stars, like Jean-Michel Basquiat. People would order Chef Patrick Clark’s steak frites, but the food would get cold while they mingled or took frequent trips downstairs to “the best place to do blow or get laid in Manhattan,” as one regular recalled of the Odeon’s tucked-away bathroom. Despite the noise, Janowitz, with her big hair and her thrift-store-chic-meets-Vampira look, paid attention to everything, all the gossip and stories, looking for inspiration.

Jay McInerney was 26 in 1981. He was an Odeon regular, alongside his friend Gary Fisketjon, a Random House editor he’d met when they were both in undergrad together at Williams College. McInerney had worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, before he started selling his short stories, but that job wasn’t for him—or at least the magazine didn’t think so. He went to the Odeon to pick up women, but it also featured prominently in his newest story, “It’s Six A.M., Do You Know Where You Are?” which he’d just sold to The Paris Review. So it was also sort of like research.

A year later, that first short story would finally run and McInerney’s career would start to fall into place. And a few years after that, the Christian Science Monitor’s Hilary DeVries would call his debut Bright Lights, Big City“1984’s trendiest novel.” She’d place him and a few other “under-30 novelists” in the “literary brat pack”: young writers who were rumored to spend more time in downtown bars and nightclubs partying until dawn instead of writing. Just like Hollywood at the time, which was in the middle of a youth movement—their “brat pack” corollary included Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, and Molly Ringwald—the literary world was, too. The term wasn’t meant to stick to the writers, but it did, and for decades after, they would be tied to the label.

It was a great party for a few years. But like everything else in the 1980s, it had to crash sooner or later.

In the fall of 1982, Bennington College creative writing teacher Joe McGinniss—famed for being the youngest living writer to have a #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller, at 26, for 1969’s The Selling of the President 1968—called his friend Morgan Entrekin, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, with a proposal. “I have the most interesting student writer I’ve ever seen,” McGinniss said, and added: “He’s a freshman.”

Entrekin was wary. People pitched him book ideas all the time; most were busts. And anyway, how could a college freshman have written something that good? But he bit, and what McGinniss gave Entrekin—a handful of journal entries from a young Los Angeles student named Bret Easton Ellis—would end up being better than nearly anything he’d seen in his career thus far. Entrekin recognized the same kind of generational chronicling in Ellis’ work that made writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon the trippy literary voices of the ’60s counterculture. The editor was barely a decade older than Ellis, but he could tell this was something different. And he knew it could sell.

At Bennington, Ellis found a mentor in McGinniss, along with a group of other students looking to make it as writers. By sophomore year, thanks to McGinniss and Entrekin’s interest, Ellis was far ahead of his classmates. Finishing his “project” became an obsession. Around Thanksgiving of 1982, Ellis traveled down to Manhattan to meet with Entrekin to talk about his writing. Ellis’ father had an apartment at the Carlyle, so he stayed there, Entrekin recalls. “He had mono or something—he was deathly ill. He just seemed really withdrawn.” But the work spoke for itself: “The pages, to me, were amazing,” says Entrekin. He found them fascinating enough that he sent excerpts to editor friends at Harper’s and Rolling Stone to see if they’d be interested in publishing it. He never heard back.