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refrain from seeking his mentor’s advice again. As for Branden, looking back he thought that he and Barbara should have ended their relationship that night, in the late fall of 1951. Instead, with Rand’s encouragement he became her unofficial psychotherapist. “He was going to help me reach the exalted state where I would be fully in love with him,” Barbara told an interviewer in 1990. “Confessing to a man who flayed me alive each time I confessed was supposedly in the interest of my self-esteem.” They hardened their resolve and became engaged in the summer of 1952. Six months later, they were married.

In the intervening period, they introduced a dozen of their brightest relatives and friends to Rand. Wishing to “expand our circle,” Branden wrote, he deliberately set out to convert those close to him to Rand’s ethos of radical individualism in a conformist world. During the summers of 1950 and 1951, he persuaded his three older sisters, Florence, Elayne, and Reva, to read or reread The Fountainhead and share his enthusiasm for it. He patiently proselytized his first cousin, Allan Blumenthal, an intelligent, soft-spoken young medical student and pianist. Barbara introduced her college roommate and best friend since childhood (and Dr. Blumenthal’s future wife), NYU graduate art student Joan Mitchell. Joan, in turn, brought along a friend, Mary Ann Sures, and the future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan. (In 1953, Joan and Greenspan were briefly married. They remained on excellent terms after dissolving their marriage in 1954. Joan married Allan Blumenthal in 1957.) Barbara also enlisted her bright, bespectacled seventeen-year-old first cousin Leonard Peikoff, young for his age, who shortly after meeting Rand dropped out of a Canadian pre-med program and, to his parents’ horror, enrolled at NYU to study philosophy. This familial group formed the core of Rand’s later band of followers, with no one more devoted to her than Peikoff.

Ayn Rand, age four, and her extended family in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1909. Center row, from left: Rand’s parents, Zinovy and Anna Rosenbaum; Rand’s maternal grandmother, Rozalia Kaplan; Rand’s cousin Nina Guzarchik, Rand’s maternal grandfather, Berko Kaplan; and Rand, leaning against her grandfather’s knee.

Rand’s Russian passport photograph, dated October 29, 1925, when Rand was twenty years old.

Rand, fourth from left, with other Studio Club residents during “Cleanup Week” in Hollywood May 1927.

An original illustration of Cyrus, the hero of The Mysterious Valley by Maurice Champagne and Rene Giffey, first published in serial form in 1914. Cyrus was Rand’s “exclusive love” from ages nine to twelve.

Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, circa 1920. “It was an absolute that this was the man I wanted.”

Nick Carter, Frank O’Connor’s brother. “Ayn and Frank could not have happened nor have lasted without him.”

Isabel Paterson, 1939.

Rand at her desk at the ranch in Chatsworth, California, in 1947. The house was designed by Richard Neutra for Josef von Sternberg in 1935 and was purchased by Rand in 1944.

Rand with friend and fellow anti-Communist activist Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers, in Hollywood, 1951.

Ayn and Frank on the long driveway to the Chatsworth house, lined with birch trees presented to von Sternberg by Marlene Dietrich.

Rand listening to testimony presented to the House Un-American Activities Committee, October 1947, in the marble caucus room of the Old House Office Building in Washington, D.C.

Rand being sworn in as a friendly witness at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

O’Connor and Rand, dressed in protective gear, visiting Inland Steel, in Chicago, 1947. She watched steel being poured and met with a metallurgist and a plant superintendent, as preparation for the creation of Rearden Steel in Atlas Shrugged. Unidentified Inland Steel executive at left.

Frank O’Connor, neighbor Janet Gaynor, and Rand outside the Chatsworth house.

On the set of The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper