Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [0]
Alas, that you would understand my word: “Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.”
—Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1885
CONTENTS
Preface
ONE Before the Revolution 1905–1917
TWO Looters 1917–1925
THREE Freedom to Think 1926–1934
FOUR We Are Not Like Our Brothers 1934–1938
FIVE The Fountainhead 1936–1941
SIX The Soul of an Individualist 1939–1942
SEVEN Money 1943
EIGHT Fame 1943–1946
NINE The Top and the Bottom 1946–1949
TEN The Means and the End 1950–1953
ELEVEN The Immovable Mover 1953–1957
TWELVE Atlas Shrugged 1957
THIRTEEN The Public Philosopher 1958–1963
FOURTEEN Account Overdrawn 1962–1967
FIFTEEN Either/Or (The Break) 1967–1968
SIXTEEN In the Name of the Best Within Us 1969–1982
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Abbreviation Key
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
PREFACE
Ayn Rand died in her Murray Hill apartment in New York City in 1982, at the age of seventy-seven. Although she had spent her last thirty years as a familiar presence in the city where I lived, offering lectures and readings, I never met her. With no particular evidence, I assumed that her best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (the only ones I knew about), were potboilers or propaganda. They certainly had an eerie effect on some of my acquaintances who read them and who began to talk about “the earned and the unearned,” “free markets and free minds,” and an individualist hero named John Galt. Besides, in the 1970s, when I moved to New York, I was busy reading E. L. Doctorow, J. M. Keynes, and Little Magazines.
Hence, unlike most of Rand’s readers, I came across her books not as a young person but in my forties, while working as an editor on a financial magazine. A contributor, Suze Orman, showed me the two-thousand-word text of Francisco d’Anconia’s famous “money speech” from Atlas Shrugged. “So you think that money is the root of all evil?” the capitalist hero Francisco asks a group of New Deal—style lobbyists and bureaucrats. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money?” Rand’s answer, in part, is that money is the “tool and symbol” of a society built on mutual, voluntary trade rather than forced labor, duty to the state, or war. It is an engine of economic progress. “But money is only a tool,” she writes. “It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.” Orman appended a note: This was exactly what she was trying to say in the essay I was editing.
The passage surprised me by defending limitless wealth in a way that was logical, original, complex, and, though somewhat overbearing, beautifully written. I learned that Rand had often presented this long passage as a test of intelligence and literary acumen to potential new disciples, including her most famous follower, Alan Greenspan. I went on to devour her novels and, later, to read her speeches, essays, letters, journals, screenplays, and theatrical plays. (A complete list of her published works appears in the Selected Bibliography.) I became a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations.
Although Rand is rarely taught in universities, new readers, most in their teens and twenties, have always found their way to her books. Together The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) have typically sold more than 300,000 copies a year, easily making them the equivalent of best-sellers. Recently, in the midst of a financial crisis greater than any since the Great Depression—the proximate setting of Atlas Shrugged—sales of her last and most ambitious book have nearly tripled. More than thirteen million copies of the two books are in print in the United States.
Because most readers encounter her in their formative years, she has had a potent influence on three generations of Americans. Her controversial themes and racy romantic scenes made her famous in the 1940s and 1950s. She attracted a youthful right-wing following in the