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the initial series, which began in January 1958 and was held every week in a meeting room in the small, elegant Sheraton Russell Hotel on Park Avenue, only a block or two from the O’Connors’ and the Brandens’ apartments, twenty-eight people signed up. Branden was a natural showman: handsome, virile, articulate, young, impassioned, even poetic. He was passionate about Rand’s ideas and he loved to perform. Word spread that the NBI lectures were mandatory for New Yorkers interested in Rand’s books or in a life of individualism, and during his second season in the fall of 1958, forty-five people enrolled. At Barbara’s suggestion, he began placing small announcements in The New York Times, titled “Lectures on Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand & Its Application to Human Psychology.” The text promised that Miss Rand herself would answer questions after every lecture. From that point on, attendance rose steadily until it peaked at an average of about two hundred people in each twice-yearly series of lectures—an immense turnout for a private study group. Apart from Rand’s growing circle of devotees, participants were much like her core readers: scientists and engineers, college and graduate students, professors, nurses, doctors, businesspeople, lawyers, artists, and lost souls. They listened, spellbound, to Branden’s descriptions of the almost limitless human potential—a phrase she first used in Atlas Shrugged—of lives rooted in a philosophy of reason, purpose, and self-esteem. During the question periods, the famous novelist was gracious, serene, and thrillingly lucid in these early lectures. One regular participant, an attorney, remembered that her “every word, every sentence was magic.”

Many enrolled for second and third terms. When they requested additional topics, Branden enlisted Alan Greenspan to give a talk entitled “The Economics of a Free Society,” Barbara to speak on “The Principles of Efficient Thinking,” and Mary Ann Sures and Leonard Peikoff to explore, respectively, art and the history of philosophy up to and including Rand. By popular demand, the maestro herself launched her own private lecture series, on the art of writing romantic-realist fiction, which also began in early 1958. For six months, she gave informal workshops in her apartment, with about a dozen NBI students ranged in chairs around the living room and a table and microphone set up to record her remarks. By all accounts, the talks were fascinating, if self-referential; she depended mainly on examples from her novels to illustrate the correct principles of character creation, narrative description, and unity of plot and theme.

There were a few disagreeable incidents, two of them involving the wife of her lover. She spent half a session analyzing what she regarded as the overwritten prose and bad plotting of Thomas Wolfe, choosing to critique the very passages that Barbara had praised eight years before. She liked to test her listeners for depth of understanding and, during the final session, called on Nathaniel to read aloud from an anonymous short story, then asked the class for comments. The story was a farcical tale of a small-town reporter who kidnaps the town’s richest girl in order to produce exciting news and make his name; the plot thickens when a local gangster named Pug-Nosed Thompson scoops him and collects the ransom. The story ends when the kidnapped girl refuses to go free until the reporter agrees to marry her. The story was full of 1920s tabloid dialect (“My stars in heaven!” the newspaper’s editor cries, whereupon a reporter shouts, “Hot diggity dog!”). Barbara was first to raise her hand. She said that the story was competently plotted—almost like an Ayn Rand story!—but awkwardly written and without much point. That made for a surprise ending, because Rand had written the story, “Good Copy,” in 1927. Offended by the criticism or by a suggestion of condescension on Barbara’s part, “she began to shout in outrage,” Barbara recalled. “I knew nothing about literature [she said], I knew nothing about writing, and most of all, I knew