About the Book
Three weeks before Ayn Rand’s birth in St. Petersburg, Russia, her parents heard nearby gunfire from the uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, whose consequences would go far to shape Rand’s lifelong commitment to anti-Communism and unrestricted individualism. Ayn Rand and the World She Made traces the life of the twentieth century’s most outspoken and controversial proponent of individualism and capitalism from her early childhood in czarist Russia through the Russian Revolution of 1917 to her remarkable career as a novelist and polemicist in America, where she arrived at age 21.
Blunt and socially awkward, but also brilliant and single-minded, she began her improbable career as a junior screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille in 1920s Hollywood. On the set of King of Kings, she spotted a handsome young minor actor, followed him, tripped him with her foot, and married him. She published her first novel in 1936. Seven years later, she produced The Fountainhead, a bible of individualism for four generations. Fourteen years after that, she finished Atlas Shrugged, whose critique of the welfare state changed the American political landscape forever. At age 50, she took as a lover a handsome young acolyte 25 years her junior. In the 1950s and 1960s, she and her acolyte built a national cult following. Objectivism, as they called their philosophy, may have given rise to the unlikeliest cult in history, but it secured her name as a social critic as well as a best-selling novelist.
Rand was a larger-than-life figure in her own time, and her cultural importance continues to grow. In a 1991 survey jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, readers named Atlas Shrugged the book that most influenced their lives, second only to the Bible. In 1998, when the Modern Library asked readers to name the 20th century’s 100 greatest books, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were numbers one and two on the list. Rand’s earlier novels, Anthem and We the Living, were numbers seven and eight, trumping The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Ulysses. (In an echo of a theme running throughout the author’s life, her work didn’t appear at all on a companion list of great books compiled by American professors; until recently, she has largely been ignored by college teachers.)
Her ideas permeate contemporary American policies and institutions. Hundreds of former protégés, including Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, Libertarian Party founder John Hospers, former Barron’s editorial director Robert Bleiberg, and best-selling psychologist of self-esteem Nathaniel Branden, lead government agencies, publications, corporations, and popular movements. Forbes and Fortune regularly mention Rand as a present-day hero of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Television hosts and Tea Party activists invoke her name. Hundreds of campus study groups and clubs continue to debate her views.
Based on the author’s original research in Russia, scores of detailed interviews with Rand’s acquaintances and former disciples, and previously unexamined archives of tapes and letters, Ayn Rand and the World She Made is a comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and unlikely figures of the twentieth century.
Praise for Ayn Rand and the World She Made
“Famous for her credo of individualism and unbridled capitalism, novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand never talked about her life as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, an “awkward and offbeat” Russian Jewish girl of “startling intelligence.” Yet Heller believes that Rand’s adamant self-regard and vehement protest against any form of collectivism or social conscience are rooted in her family’s suffering in early-twentieth-century Russia, where Jews were violently persecuted and personal freedom was abolished. Heller is the first to fully investigate and vigorously chronicle Rand’s willful life and phenomenal and controversial achievements, from her sense of destiny (by age 11 she had already written four novels) to her arrival in America at age 21 in 1926, her work in Hollywood, and her reign in New York as a cult figurehead. Heller also offers arresting analysis of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s critically condemned yet perpetually popular and enormously influential novels of erotic melodrama and self- aggrandizing ideology. But the heart of the book is the wrenching story of Rand’s marriage to long-suffering Frank O’Connor and her affair with the much younger man who packaged and peddled her beliefs as Objectivism. The champion of individuality who insisted on obedience and conformity from her followers (including Alan Greenspan), Rand emerges from Heller’s superbly vivid, enlightening, and affecting biography in all her paradoxical power.”—Booklist, starred review
“Riveting, massively researched…This is a fascinating study of a fascinating and implacable woman; it’s a major work. Heller has done an extraordinary job.”—Patricia Bosworth, author of Diane Arbus: A Biography
“Heller's riveting depiction of Rand's marriage to Frank O'Connor--a Hollywood-handsome, sometime-actor who by and large was happy to be her chevalier servant--and the biographer's fascinating account of Rand's tortured affair with Nathaniel Branden, a Rand disciple half her age, make Ayn Rand and the World She Made a worthy companion to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, this is biography with the density and pace of a fine novel.”—Carl Rollyson, author of “On Biography,” in the New York Sun
“An intriguing look at an important woman…reveals Rand’s fierce intelligence and forceful will to seduce and influence some of the 20th century’s leading decision makers.”—Janet Wallach, author of Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell
“Anne C. Heller is as honest and as objective and as forthright as Rand’s own principles would demand….there are many interesting new details.”—Timothy Sandefur, www.theatlasphere.com
“Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand . . .paints a detailed and engaging portrait of Rand’s interior life.” —Jonathan Chait, The New Republic
