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love. In it, a writer (in later drafts, a dancer) named Hella Maris falls in love with “a man of action,” Lorne Dieterling, who spurns her to marry a worldly woman named Gloria Thornton, who is better suited to advance his unspecified ambitions. Dieterling’s mistake is to “sacrifice values for the sake of ‘living on earth,’” Rand wrote, “for the sake of action, motivated by a passionate pro-life premise [and] an unbreached (‘Narcissus’-like) self-esteem, but thrown off by the wrong premise of taking action as a primary.” (Ten years later, she would repeat this description of a “wrong premise” while analyzing what had gone wrong with her lover Branden.) Other notes identify the novel’s theme in terms of her old preoccupation: “the art of psychological survival in a malevolent world.” The essence of the story would be “the universe of my ‘tiddlywink’ music.” After a day or two of work, however, she set her notes aside. She would resume musing on the characters and their relationships intermittently throughout the 1960s, but she never wrote the novel.

Branden and his circle were deeply bewildered and angered by the injustice of the critics’ assaults on Rand. Anxious to defend the ideas he believed in and lift her spirits, he organized a letter-writing campaign by her senior and junior confederates, who together now officially numbered twenty-nine. “We were all strongly encouraged,” said one follower, “in fact, it was practically demanded by Nathaniel, that we send letters to the editors and the writers of these negative reviews. We were told that after all Ayn had given us, we owed her absolutely full support, and that it would be traitorous not to ‘smite’ anyone who criticized her.” Alan Greenspan and Barbara Branden wrote to The New York Times. Murray Rothbard, newly returned to the fold, answered Commonweal’s charge that Atlas lacked compassion and “proceeds from hate;” he pointed out that its author displayed a lot of compassion—for the heroic individuals who were being eaten alive by society’s looters. Leonard Peikoff, Daryn Kent, and Rand’s old friend and ally John Chamberlain took on Chambers and National Review, though without making much headway against the editors’ cozy assurance that they had bested Rand. Branden talked everyone into canceling subscriptions to Time.

Like the Willkie campaign, the mostly brutal reception of Atlas Shrugged seems to have been a turning point for Rand. Battered by black moods, her sense of estrangement from others deepened. That “wounded stranger,” pain, returned and required forceful measures to be stilled, and her hope for literary justice, which she said she had given up after the publication of We the Living, permanently died away and was replaced by a taste for loyalty and adulation, at least from the young. Her life’s mission to create an ideal man and delineate the ideas and worldly conditions that would allow him to live, love, create, and produce had been completed. But the society outside her study door did not accept her novel as its model. “She had left Galt’s Gulch and come out into a rather sleazy world,” said Barbara Branden. “She was tired.” Perhaps it’s not surprising that, to some degree, she continued to inhabit the world of her novel. “Ayn had disappeared into [the] alternate reality [of Atlas Shrugged] and was not coming back,” Nathaniel Branden wrote. “Something was gone, and gone irretrievably.”

Something had changed for Nathaniel as well. “What kind of world is this?” he remembered saying to his wife, and, “Ayn has done enough. She’s entitled to rest. It’s our turn now.” From that point on, “I felt like my job was to protect her from the world, from disappointment, from suffering,” he said. For months, he had been making plans for a series of public lectures called “The Basic Principles of Objectivism,” combining an elegantly structured and highly detailed description of her philosophy with his own corresponding theories of psychology and the nature and source of self-esteem. He felt certain that “one part of my destiny was to transmit her message to the world.