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to publishers, Rand’s mood continued to be optimistic. Here, at last, she seemed to have found people—Woods, Wick, Mencken, others—who could understand her. O’Connor appeared to be settling in. Nick Carter, her favorite O’Connor brother-in-law, was writing for newspapers and lived in a hotel room within easy visiting distance. Her acquaintance Ivan Lebedeff was in and out of town, and she was meeting a few prominent political conservatives: Melville Cane, a distinguished poet, former journalist, friend of Sinclair Lewis, and copyright attorney who became her guide in literary legal matters, and Cane’s partner Pincus Berner and his wife, who would become important friends and allies in years to come. She met and corresponded with Ethel Boileau, the wife of a British baronet and the author of A Gay Family and The Clansmen, who described her own literary mission as a defense of individualism. “Is it still possible to stop collectivism,” Lady Boileau asked Rand in a letter, “or is it too late?” Rand responded by articulating one of her developing core themes: “All achievement and progress has been accomplished, not just by men of ability and certainly not by groups of men, but by a struggle between man and mob;” the struggle, she seemed to suggest, would be won by individuals.

She also met an impressionable twenty-two-year-old aspiring playwright named Albert Mannheimer, a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama and a junior theater critic for the New York Enquirer. Mannheimer, tall, fair, and curly haired, was an earnest Marxist who had interrupted his studies to make a pilgrimage to Moscow with his friend the future novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg and others, including an eventual member of the Hollywood Ten, Ring Lardner, Jr. Mannheimer, an aspiring playwright, happened to be living in Rand’s apartment building, and a mutual theatrical acquaintance introduced them. When, during their first conversation, he announced that he would convert her to the Communist ideology, she countered by predicting that it was she who would convert him, and do it within a year. It didn’t take that long. He became her first proselyte and unofficial follower. Mesmerized by her intellectual charisma and the logical precision of her thinking, and probably also flattered by her gestures of friendship, he met her often for coffee and intense debate. He became a vehement advocate of capitalism and would grow closer to her in the 1940s.

Perhaps best of all for Rand, as she awaited word on her play and her novel, was the fact that she was living in New York. She never enjoyed walking, but she saw the sights, and there were many. In the years between her first brief visit and 1935, a construction boom had heightened and beautified the city skyline. On the former site of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, the steel-faceted Empire State Building had risen like a jagged needle, replacing the Woolworth Building as the tallest structure in the world. As a symbol of the wonders that human reason could perform, this building thrilled her; once she began to earn money, she would always try to have a view of its spire from her apartment windows. Meanwhile, the Waldorf-Astoria had been reinvented as an Art Deco masterpiece on Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street and had tripled in size; she would one day draw on its grandeur for the fictional Wayne-Falkland Hotel in Atlas Shrugged. In spite of the collapse of New York’s economy in the Depression, Times Square and the theater district were thriving. Lillian Hellman’s first play, The Children’s Hour, and Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! were two of more than a hundred theatrical productions lighting Broadway. Although Rand and her husband probably couldn’t afford to see many plays, she would have known of both. Odets was a founding member of the nation’s first theater collective, modeled on the Russian Moscow Art Theatre, and he had recently staged a play by John Howard Lawson, president of the Hollywood Screen Writers Guild and an early Communist organizer in Hollywood,