• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1532 0

and handed in a manuscript. Cerf was thrilled. Apparently, he hadn’t read it yet. When his editors read it, they hit the roof over an essay that was intended to give the book its title, an inflammatory critique of the Kennedy administration called “The Fascist New Frontier.” Outrageous by the standards of the day, it likened the economic policies of Kennedy—for example, increasing the minimum wage and funding public housing—to Fascism in the 1930s, and Kennedy to Hitler. Her purpose was to remind Americans of the distinction between socialism (government ownership of industry, capital, and property), of which she thought the electorate might approve, and Fascism (government control of industry and private property for the benefit of favored groups), which she saw as a hallmark of the New Frontier. Cerf’s editors demanded that Random House refuse to print the essay. Three weeks after heralding the arrival of the manuscript, Cerf dejectedly told Rand and Perry Knowlton that the author would have to remove the essay and change the title of the book.

“He made his decision not to publish without even consulting me,” Rand complained to Barbara Branden. One day in mid-October, she marched into his office and reminded him of his promise not to be political, never to censor her, and to publish anything she wrote. He had been talking about fiction, he pleaded, and asked her, at a minimum, to remove the passages from Hitler’s speeches and change the title of the essay to something not implicating Kennedy, such as “America’s Drift Toward Fascism.” She was adamant in her refusal; her whole point was to show that the Kennedy Administration’s ideology wasn’t socialistic, as people might think, but fascistic.

As he recalled a few years later, she followed him down to the street from his office, arguing with him while he hailed a taxicab to take him home to change for dinner. As he climbed into the taxi, she cried, “You’re going to print every word I’ve written, or I won’t let you publish the book!” He called back, unhappily, “That’s that. Get yourself another publisher.”

She did.

She liked New American Library’s spirited founder and editor-in-chief, Victor Weybright, who, in addition to being her paperback publisher, had contracted to pay an astonishing quarter of a million dollars for the right to publish To Lorne Dieterling, the new “unrequited love story” she had begun to outline in late 1957, without ever seeing a proposal or her scanty notes. He agreed to publish the collection. A year later, in December 1964, he released it as an original paperback with a new, almost equally provocative title, The Virtue of Selfishness. It sold well, and in 1965 he reissued it in hardback. The firm became Rand’s primary publisher and went on to publish and republish her nonfiction collections, the paperback editions of her novels, and her plays until industry mergers finally put an end to the NAL imprint. Until then, year in and year out, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the huge sales of Rand’s books paid many of the bills at NAL.

In spite of her friendship with Weybright, NAL wasn’t in the same publishing league with Random House, and after Weybright’s death in 1974, things went rapidly downhill for Rand. Perry Knowlton had to nag and coax the editors into paying proper attention to her books. His best leverage was the unwritten To Lorne Dieterling; because of this and her financial clout, an NAL staffer was, at minimum, always “delegated to Ayn Rand duty,” as one editor recalled. “That meant that every nine months to a year you’d have lunch with her—let her know how important she was and listen to her drone on.” A second editor added, “She asked me at lunch if I’d be interested in being cast” in a planned TV miniseries of Atlas Shrugged. “I thought, ‘She’s pretty old to be flirting,’ but I said, ‘That sounds great.’” A senior editor who grew extremely fond of her recalled his anger when a group of his colleagues, including the president of NAL, told him about their having gone together to a dinner party in her apartment without having bothered