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spellbinding person, even if she was singularly sure of her ideas and impossible to vanquish in an argument. But as Cerf remarked years later, she was also behaving like a movie queen with a retinue, trailing a crowd of followers he didn’t especially like. Looking back in 1971, he called Nathaniel Branden and his circle “hangers-on,” “brownnosers,” “sycophants,” “stooges.” Editor Haydn saw them as a group of unattractive malcontents. When she and they were in a room together, he wrote, “the very whining, toadying quality of the camp followers threw into brilliant relief the wholly dedicated, crusading, intrepid nature of the leader.” Both men had only a limited view of Rand, but they recognized an important effect on her of her expanding group of admirers: Every time its members told her, one another, and outsiders that she was a genius on a world historical scale, they encouraged her to add a layer of polish to her self-regard. She began to act the part of a Madame de Stael of contemporary philosophy.

Although she always considered herself a novelist above all, in interviews she presented herself as a woman of ideas. Turning the tables on her literary critics, she displayed the elegantly constructed epistemology and ethics of John Galt’s speech as proof that the world of Atlas Shrugged was not only plausible but philosophically inevitable: the perfect product of impersonal reason. In a New York Post interview published two months after the novel’s debut, she went further, designating herself the world’s best, or at least most consistent, philosopher. Asked, “Are you the most creative thinker alive today?” she said, “If anyone can pick a single rational flaw in my philosophy, I would be delighted to acknowledge him and learn something from him. Until then—I am.” At the time of the interview, she hadn’t yet published a single line of nonfiction philosophical writing.

As requests for interviews and appearances poured in, Barbara and Nathaniel persuaded her to give a number of public lectures. They predicted that she would be a riveting speaker and that live audiences would energize her after the embittering print reception of Atlas Shrugged. Reluctantly, she agreed. Given her popularity among the young, colleges seemed a likely setting. In early 1958, she gave a lecture called “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World” to student groups at Queens College, NYU, and City College in New York, contrasting the fruit of reason (freedom) with the historical consequences of mysticism and tyranny (the annihilation of independent thought). Although she was anxious about possible hecklers, the lecture went well. Dressed in her trademark black cape adorned with a provocative gold lapel pin in the shape of a dollar sign—a gift from the Brandens, which she would wear until her death—she impressed students with her lucidity and passion for ideas. At Brooklyn College, she gave a talk to the nation’s first Ayn Rand Club titled “Zero Worship,” her unforgettable name for the altruists’ supposed tendency to revere the poor and undistinguished and to hate and envy the productive rich. Here, a crowd of hostile students and teachers did come to heckle her, but she found that she relished the give-and-take, just as she had enjoyed debating with passersby on Fourteenth Street during the Willkie campaign. “I was awed by the power of what she had to say,” said a member of the audience that day. During the question-and-answer period, “she didn’t take anything personally; she was completely devoted to her principles.” There and elsewhere, her meticulous arguments for individual liberty startled many students into taking a fresh look at their assumptions.

At the same time, she was enjoying watching as Branden thoroughly and deftly systematized the ideas in John Galt’s speech into a series of twenty lectures of his own. These included “What Is Philosophy?” “The Meaning and Nature of Volition,” “God,” “The Psychology of Sex,” and, most characteristically, “Why Human Beings Repress and Drive Underground Not the Worst Within Them but the Best.” For