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By Root 1491 0

It was published in England” but not in the United States. Surprised to hear of a book by Rand he hadn’t read, Read told her that he had recently founded a tiny publishing company, called Pamphleteers, Inc., whose purpose was to print and distribute libertarian monographs. It had already issued one by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and one by Isabel Paterson’s friend Rose Wilder Lane. He and Rand agreed that Pamphleteers, Inc., would publish Anthem as its first, and only, venture into fiction. The resulting ninety-eight-page booklet appeared in July 1946 and sold for a dollar a copy; ironically, it had as one of its distributors a one-man organization called the Pro-American Information Bureau, described by the liberal newspaper PM as the U.S. purveyor of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols was a famous, forged document purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. It had been written by an anti-Semitic Russian secret policeman at about the time of Ayn Rand’s birth. Of course, Rand and Read didn’t know this.

Rand reworked the original 1938 British edition for American publication, and her revisions became standard in all subsequent editions. Although they weren’t as self-conscious or as radical as those she would make for the 1959 republication of We the Living, they were extensive and revealing. To simplify and streamline the narrative language, she lessened her hero Equality 7–2521’s reliance on biblical turns of phrase and echoes of Nietzsche’s stern poetry of contrasts. The nineteenth-century German philosopher remains a forceful presence in the fable, however. “What can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under,” Nietzsche’s hero Zarathustra says to an assembled crowd in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Man is a rope between beast and [Superman].” “We shall go down,” Equality 7–2521 announces to his friend International 4–8818 when they come upon an underground tunnel, the contents of which eventually lead him to reinvent electric light. Rand’s symbolism is her tribute to Zarathustra.

Although by this time everyone acknowledged that “Ayn Rand is a phenomenon in literature,” as Rose Wilder Lane put it in a review of the reissued Anthem in the Economic Council Review of Books, the lyrical novella padded very quietly into the literary marketplace. Two or three additional reviews appeared in small publications, such as the Columbia Missourian, but the individualist parable did not become a popular success until a commercial publisher released a paperback edition in 1961. Still, Rand was fond of this short work, which she considered the parent of The Fountainhead. She mailed gift copies to Cecil B. DeMille, to The New York Times reviewer Lorine Pruette, to her Boss, Hal Wallis, to Henry Blanke at Warner Bros., to Walt Disney, and to Barbara Stanwyck, who continued to campaign for the part of Dominique. She also sent Stanwyck a copy of her 1932 script Red Pawn, hoping that the star of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers would see a role for herself in Joan, the story’s American wife and mistress, and that Wallis would produce it. Stanwyck wasn’t interested, and Wallis turned it down.

Rand remained an active opponent of Communist sympathizers wherever she went, particularly in postwar Hollywood. Along with her friends Sam Wood, John Ford, Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers, the producer James McGuinness, King Vidor (the future director of The Fountainhead), Walt Disney, and Morrie Ryskind, she helped create an organized opposition to left-leaning craft guilds and unions such as the Conference of Studio Unions and the Screen Writers Guild. With the rumored silent backing of Louis B. Mayer, these “campaigners for freedom” set up the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, or MPA, whose mission it was to push back “the rising tide” of Communism in movies and promote the American way of life. Members met weekly at MGM Studios, and MGM executive Robert Vogel remembered that Rand attended almost every meeting.

Rand sat on the MPA executive board, and