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colleges and universities, she wrote. He had been granted three interviews and had been “explicitly rejected because of his views.” Hook replied, not unkindly, that before recommending his former student for another teaching job, he would have to be satisfied that Peikoff would not inject, where inappropriate, Randian dogma into classroom instruction. “I made that a condition before giving him a couple of classes to teach at NYU many years ago,” Hook wrote. “He didn’t live up to the condition … I still recommended him in hopes he would mature and try to follow the pedagogic model to which he had been exposed in my classes. … I do not believe, concerned as he is with teaching the message, he is interested in students as individual human beings and helping them develop their own independent personalities.” The eminent professor also cited longstanding reports of Peikoff’s “spiteful fury” against associates who differed with him, manifested in boycott campaigns against colleagues’ books and in nuisance lawsuits, in the intensity of which he exceeded even Rand.

She also named him an editor of The Objectivist and of its scaled-down successor publication, The Ayn Rand Letter, until late 1974, when the Letter was discontinued. “I am tired of saying ‘I told you so,’” she wrote. The essays she contributed to almost every issue were not the sweeping policy statements of the 1960s; they were sometimes illuminating, more often bitter assessments of current events. She published position papers against the war on poverty, “selfless” hippies, affirmative action, government funding of the arts, international relief aid, the Watergate Committee—as well as in opposition to the Vietnam War and a wave of 1970s anti-obscenity legislation. She crafted a brilliant and farsighted critique of B. F. Skinner’s 1971 behaviorist manifesto, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which she aptly quoted Victor Hugo: “And he [the student Marius in Les Misérables] blesses God for having given him these two riches which many of the rich are lacking: work, which gives him freedom, and thought, which gives him dignity.” More often, she quoted from her own work in rebuttal to the prevailing wisdom of the decade’s altruists and shallow thinkers.

In 1969, she led a course in nonfiction writing, with the announced purpose of training a new brigade of contributors to The Objectivist. The class met on Saturday evenings in her apartment, where she offered detailed if conventional advice about content and composition. Edited, these lessons appeared posthumously as The Art of Nonfiction. Also in 1969, she published The Romantic Manifesto, a collection of essays reflecting on the philosophical meaning of art as “sense of life” and as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments,” which was Rand’s definition of the romantic strain in which she wrote. She continued to present her popular annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston but accepted few other public engagements.

There were memorable exceptions. In July 1969, Alan Greenspan, then a member of President Nixon’s Gates Commission on the draft, arranged for her to be present for NASA’s launch of Apollo 11 at Cape Kennedy, Florida, an event that for the first time placed men on the surface of the moon. She was thrilled by the sight of the powerful rocket lifting into the sky. “What we had seen, in naked essentials, was the concentrated abstraction of man’s greatness,” she wrote in The Objectivist. When the spacecraft landed on the Moon, she praised Neil Armstrong’s broadcast comment, which might have come from Atlas Shrugged: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Although she didn’t approve of government funding for scientific projects except in military matters, she restated what she had written about the atomic bomb: “It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice.” The family with whom she and O’Connor