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forebears’ limited freedom as Jews in the anti-Semitic Russian empire, about her formal education in St. Petersburg and the Crimea, and about her experiences during the Russian Revolution. I listened to half a dozen unpublished tape recordings of speeches, interviews, and lectures presented over the years by archivists at the Ayn Rand Institute and enjoyed unprecedented access to forty hours of taped biographical interviews with Rand conducted by Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, all of which filled in many details of the writer’s childhood and troubled young adulthood. Freedom of Information Act documents cast light on her first years in America and, among other things, helped to explain the timing of her 1929 marriage to her husband, Frank O’Connor. Journalist Jeff Walker and collector Marc Schwalb let me listen to privately recorded interviews with Rand’s friends from the 1920s through the 1970s, many of them now dead, whose comments suggested aspects of Rand’s character that were new to me. I conducted more than fifty interviews with Rand’s still-living, often elderly American relatives, intimates, employees, and adversaries, including three long interviews with her former protégé and lover, Nathaniel Branden. Further insights came from viewing original letters to and about Rand and her followers housed in libraries and archival collections in Hollywood; San Francisco; New York; Washington, D.C.; Auburn, Alabama; Scottsdale, Arizona; Provo, Utah; Bloomington, Indiana; and West Branch, Iowa, and from drafts and galley proofs of Rand’s four novels on file at the Library of Congress.

Gallant, driven, brilliant, brash, cruel, as accomplished as her heroes, and ultimately self-destructive, she has to be understood to be believed.

ANNE C. HELLER

FEBRUARY 2009

ONE

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

1905–1917

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism. I was born with that obsession and have never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and more tragically needed. Call it fate or irony, but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia.

—Autobiographical Sketch, 1936

When the fierce and extraordinary Ayn Rand was fifty-two years old, about to become world famous, and more than thirty years removed from her birthplace in Russia, she summed up the meaning of her elaborate, invented, cerebral world this way: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” It was a world in which no dictator, no deity, and no well-meaning sense of duty would ever take away the moral right of the gifted individual—Ayn Rand—to live according to her own high-wattage lights.

This was not the world she was born into. Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Russian Jew, on February, 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, then the capital city of the most anti-Semitic and politically divided nation on the European continent. Later, she would say that she loathed everything Russian, and while this was not entirely true—she retained her appetite for Russian classical music and Russian sweets until the end of her life—she hated the passivity, brutality, and primitive religiosity of the Russia of her youth.

She had good reason for this. Her birth came barely three weeks after the brief but bloody uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, where, on a bright January Sunday morning, twelve thousand of Czar Nicholas II’s cavalrymen opened fire on thirty thousand factory workers, their wives and children, labor organizers, and students who had walked to the Winter Palace to petition for better working conditions and a role in the czar’s all-powerful government. The protest was led by a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, and many marchers were said to be praying