Anne C. Heller, a journalist who specializes in money and finance, has written a brilliant biography of Ayn Rand filled with piercing insights relevant to the world’s current economic struggles. Ayn Rand, born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was twelve years old when the Bolshevik Revolution overturned her native city of St. Petersburg. The impact of this economic catastrophe defined her work which she would later describe as anti-Communist propaganda.
Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum graduated from Petrograd State University in 1924 and then, in 1925, using the name Alice Rosenbaum, she immigrated to the United States through the assistance of relatives living in Chicago. In 1926, after visiting New York City, she reinvented herself as Ayn Rand; however, Heller questions the veracity of the oft-quoted story that her pseudonym was inspired by her use of a Remington Rand typewriter. In 1926, she moved from Chicago to Hollywood and pursued her interest in writing screenplays. There she met an aspiring actor named Frank O’Connor. They married in Los Angeles and O’Connor remained her lifetime companion until his death in 1979.
In 1934, Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor drove to New York City where she worked on preparing The Night of January 16th for its Broadway premiere and shopped her manuscript We the Living. She then spent four and a half years writing The Fountainhead—“the story of how a moral man can live in a corrupt society.” The novel was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1943 after being rejected by twelve publishers. After she sold the movie rights to Warner Bros. she and Frank returned to California, purchasing a home in the San Fernando Valley. By the time The Fountainhead was released by Warner Bros. in 1949, millions had read the book. It was during this period that she met and fell in love with Nathaniel Branden who would become her protégé and the “intellectual heir” of her philosophy.
The theme of Atlas Shrugged occurred to Rand at the precise moment she asked herself, “What if all the creative minds in the world went on strike?” The reader discovers the answer when the heroine of the novel, Dagny Taggart, crash lands in a camouflaged mountain refuge named Galt’s Gulch. (In today’s world, Galt’s Gulch would surely be located in Texas, not Colorado.) She awakens in the arms of John Galt, the “organizer of the titans’ strike,” who is the very image of her ideal man. The novel culminates with John Galt’s radio speech “prophesying” the triumph of individualism over the looters and moochers.
Ayn Rand developed a legendary fan base known as the objectivist movement or Randian subculture, due, in part, to the organizational support provided by the Nathaniel Branden Institute. Her biographer thoroughly examines the depths of Ayn Rand’s relationship with her avid supporters. The “strong-willed émigré” demanded personal loyalty and the inevitable conflicts often resulted in terminal banishment from the inner circle. Her ties to Nathaniel Branden eventually dissolved as did her relationship with her sister in Russia. No one was spared, not even her husband, and he paid a heavy price for his loyalty.
Ayn Rand, writes Heller, “envisioned national politics as a morality play whose theme is individual freedom in contest with overt or hidden mob force.” She died on March 6, 1982, but her message remains as compelling as ever in these troubled times.
Ron