Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [288]
If the book contract had been delayed: BBTBI.
To save paper: The deleted section of the novel can be read as a reconstructed narrative in TEAR (pp. 440–76) or in its original context in AR’s first-draft manuscript on file at the LOC.
Rand always thought: BBTBI.
The Fountainhead was her book: BBTBI.
hinted that she might sue: Letter to Ralph E. Lewis, of Prescott & Files, March 22, 1944 (LOAR, p. 128); also, Bobbs-Merrill Collection, Lilly Library.
The single most perceptive review: Lorine Pruette, “Battle Against Evil: The Fountainhead,” NYT, May 16, 1943, BR7.
she would be happy to hear this: TPOAR, p. 179.
“my kind of readers”: BBTBI.
at best to commit a social gaffe: BBTBI.
chronicles of the period bear her out: An especially interesting view is provided by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Random House, 2005).
“practically in every line”: Letter to DeWitt Emery, May 17, 1943 (LOAR, pp. 72–77).
other publications gradually took it up: For example, Mansfield [Ohio] News-Journal, July 8, 1943, p. 8.
“individualism” would re-enter the language: BBTBI.
Ogden lacked the power: BBTBI.
The public mood “is going our way”: Letter to DeWitt Emory, May 17, 1943 (LOAR, pp. 72–77); letter to Lorine Pruette, May 18, 1943 (LOAR, p. 75).
wait to collect any royalties: BBTBI.
she estimated the ten thousand dollars she needed: Letter to Monroe Shakespeare, November 16, 1943 (LOAR, p. 100).
approach to the du Pont family: BBTBI. The intermediary may have been Rose Wilder Lane, a libertarian and the author of another individualist book in 1943, The Discovery of Freedom. She apparently knew the du Ponts (The Woman and the Dynamo, p. 287).
only prospective donor: Letter to Monroe Shakespeare, October 10, 1943 (LOAR, p. 94).
minimum wage of thirty cents an hour: U.S. Department of Labor, “History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938–1996.”
another job selling shoes: BBTBI.
who asked him to stay on as a manager: BBTBI.
“a gray desert”: Introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of TF.
the author of eight moderately successful novels: The Woman and the Dynamo, p. 326.
she considered The Fountainhead to be so good: BBTBI.
those two weeks were the only formal vacation: BBTBI.
reached the right minds in the country: BBTBI.
Albert Jay Nock’s famous concept: “Isaiah’s Job,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1936, p. 641. Nock explained that it is Isaiah’s job, like John Galt’s, to preach to and encourage the conservative Remnant to hang on until Judgment Day. In real life, AR and others accepted this task as their own. She never acknowledged her intellectual debt to Nock, and it has never before been pointed out, as far as I know. In biographical interviews, she referred to Nock as cynical and weary.
One hundred thousand copies: BBTBI.
designated each other “sisters”: Unpublished letter from IP to AR, October 7, 1943 (Isabel Paterson Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, box 4); AR’s reply to IP, October 10, 1943 (LOAR, p. 174).
“Really, those women”: Author interview with Muriel Welles Hall, July 7, 2004.
“little sister [from] St. Petersburg”: Author interview with Muriel Welles Hall, July 7, 2004.
Council on Books in Wartime: Council on Books in Wartime Archives, 1942–47, Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton, N.J.
“It takes a book to save or destroy the world”: Letter to Earle H. Balch, November 28, 1943 (LOAR, p. 101).
as her own publisher was beginning to be inclined: In interoffice correspondence contained in the Bobbs-Merrill Archive, AR is often spoken of as unpredictable and volatile after Ogden’s departure.
By Thanksgiving: BBTBI. Again, this is what AR told BB in 1960–61. In a letter written on November 28, 1943, to one of IP’s editors at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, she estimated sales of TF at 25,000. Either she was underestimating her early sales to BB or she exaggerated them to the editor at Putnam,