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sales advantage of being, she claimed (apparently accurately), the first novel on the subject written in English by a Russian writer. Nor did the narrative need an infusion of more emotion, Hollywood style, as Wick took to arguing it did. This was not a love story—at least, not one that made sense without reference to its totalitarian setting. It was a novel of crucial topical importance, exposing as both thoughtless and corrupt the liberal-collectivist dream of stripping prerogatives from the wealthy to enhance the welfare of the poor. Such a dream always ended in the destruction of the best—in other words, of those who asked for no help and simply wanted to be left alone, and therefore had the greatest claim to life. This was a theme the American public, now more than ever, needed to hear. Defining collectivism as a system of thought or action in which the individual person is subordinated to the common interests of a group, she told Wick that its worldwide growth was “the greatest problem of our century.” Later, in a foreword to the 1959 edition, she wrote, “We the Living is not a story about Soviet Russia in 1925. It is a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or—which this novel might do its share in helping to prevent—a socialist America.”

Wick thought all this sounded much too intellectual, and said so. By this time, Rand had heard the word “intellectual” used pejoratively once too often. By summer, with the help of friends, she found a new literary agent, the highly respected Ann Watkins. Watkins began to circulate the manuscript again.

Then suddenly, after nine months of delays, The Night of January 16th was scheduled to open in mid-September. On September 8, Rand, O’Connor, and Nick Carter headed to Philadelphia by train to attend the weeklong tryouts at the Chestnut Street Opera House. These began badly and descended into chaos; with opening night on Broadway scarcely a week away, collaborator Weitzenkorn was summoned to make yet another round of last-minute changes. Rand, furious, exhausted, and fearful for her nascent reputation and her novel, felt as if she were about to go under the knife of a surgeon who hadn’t been told which of her vital organs to remove. Walking in the street one day, she burst into frustrated tears. She was without any power to control her written words or her created world, never a tolerable state for Ayn Rand.

A telegram from Watkins saved the situation from utter heartbreak. Macmillan, at one time the publishers of Henry James and H. G. Wells, had made an offer to publish We the Living. The company would pay a $250 advance against royalties and bring the book out in April 1936. The author and the O’Connor brothers, spirits suddenly high, celebrated in a Philadelphia hotel room. Selling the novel was the most wonderful thing to happen in her life to date, she wrote to Gouverneur Morris.

The Night of January 16th premiered at the Shubert-owned Ambassador Theatre in New York on the unusually chilly evening of September 16, 1935. The theater was packed and so, said Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, was the jury, with Jack Dempsey, the fighter, serving as foreman and Sidney Satenstein’s brother and other insiders filling jurors’ seats and meting out justice from the stage. The celebrity jury acquitted Karen Andre, but Atkinson wasn’t able to acquit the play of corny devices and “hokum.” The Wall Street Journal gave it a respectful nod, recommending it to theatergoers as adroit and amusing entertainment, and that view prevailed; the play quickly started earning money at the box office. Once again, though, reviewers overlooked the playwright’s underlying theme, the do-or-die contest between the Nietzschean-heroic outsider and the safe, conventional “sense of life” displayed by witnesses for the prosecution. That said, Rand’s message must have been hard to find amid Woods’s clumsy changes. The embarrassed playwright and her husband sat in the back row of the theater on opening night, adjusting themselves to the disturbing reflection