Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [277]
“Don’t read that! I’m going to destroy it”: Author interview with RBH, June 8, 2005.
Wick didn’t always pass their comments along to Rand: BBTBI.
wasn’t merely about postrevolutionary Russia: Letter to Jean Wick, July 19, 1934 (LOAR, p. 12).
the first novel on the subject written in English by a Russian writer: Based on a survey of fictional representations of Stalin in Russia by Rosalind Marsh, a professor of Russian studies at the University of Bath in England, AR’s claim appears to be true (Rosalind Marsh, Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in Literature [Oxford: Routledge, 1989]).
as Wick took to arguing it did: BBTBI.
This was a theme the American public … needed to hear: Ayn Rand, “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” Reader’s Digest, January 1944, p. 88.
“the greatest problem of our century”: Letter to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934 (LOAR, pp. 17–19).
“We the Living is not a story about Soviet Russia in 1925”: Foreword to WTL, p. xiii.
all this sounded much too intellectual: BBTBI.
On September 8, Rand, O’Connor, and Nick Carter headed for Philadelphia: “Play Uses Audience in Jury Box on Stage,” NYT, September 10, 1935, p. 26.
summoned to make yet another round of last-minute changes: TPOAR, p. 123.
felt as if she were about to go under the knife: TPOAR, p. 123.
frustrated tears: “The Hero in the Soul Manifested in the World.”
the most wonderful thing: Letter to Gouverneur Morris, November 29, 1935 (LOAR, p. 23).
The Night of January 16th premiered: The play opened on Monday, September 16. The weather was reported in NYT, September 17, 1935, p. 25.
The theater was packed: Brooks Atkinson, “The Play,” NYT, September 17, 1935, p. 26.
The celebrity jury: “The Play,” p. 26.
The Wall Street Journal: “Audience Does Jury Duty,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1935, p. 11.
sat in the back row of the theater on opening night: TPOAR, p. 124.
this was no longer Ayn Rand’s work: The 1935 production version of The Night of January 16th was first published by Longmans Green & Co. in 1936 (RKO contract), and a separate, “cleaned-up” version for amateur theatricals appeared in print slightly later (Ayn Rand, introduction to The Night of January 16th, Three Plays, p. 3). In 1968, New American Library issued an authorized version of the play, with an introduction by AR.
publisher did not ask for cutting: Letter to Gouverneur Morris, November 29, 1935 (LOAR, p. 23).
recounted the story in the early 1960s: TPOAR, pp. 124–25.
Hicks had recently joined the U.S. Communist Party: Leah Levinson and Jerry Natterstad, Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 53–56, 85, and 195–99.
an admiring biography of the American Communist John Reed: Granville Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: Macmillan, 1936). Ironically, Hicks’s book appeared on the same Macmillan list as did WTL.
published We the Living on April 7, 1936: “Books Published Today,” NYT, April 7, 1936.
“my American father”: “Ayn Rand’s Family and Friends.”
Rand told a New York Times reporter: “Books and Authors,” NYT, April 26, 1936, p. BR14.
“wild cry for the right[s] of the individual”: Ida Zeitlin, “A Passionate and Powerful Novel of Conflicts in the Red Land,” New York Herald Tribune Books, April 19, 1936, sec. VII, p. 4. Zeitlin was married to Russian refugee artist Theodore Nadejen. Russian émigrés gave the novel some of its best reviews.
“would cause Boccaccio”: J. C. Rogers, “Reds and Whites: Ayn Rand’s We the Living Portrays Aristocrats Amid Russian Revolution,” Washington Post, April 26, 1936, p. B8.
her work compared with that of Joseph Conrad: AR may never have read Conrad. At least, she was unaware that he called himself a romantic realist (a designation she took as her own) according to longtime acquaintance JKT (author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004).
“inherent sentimentality”: “New Yorker at Large,” p. 1.
“slavishly warped to the dictates of propaganda”: Harold Strauss, “Soviet Triangle,” NYT Book Review, April 19, 1936,