Ready for Her Close-Up -- Re-examining Ayn Rand's place in American intellectual and cultural life

Nick Gillespie | October 7, 2009

Ayn Rand and the World She Made. By Anne C. Heller. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 567 pp. $35

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.  By Jennifer Burns. Oxford Univ. Press. 369 pp. $27.95

Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the "greatest books" of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand's writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. During the height of the Cold War, she managed to alienate leftists by insisting that capitalism was not simply more productive but more moral than socialism or a mixed economy because it allowed the individual to express himself most fully. And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. (She once told William F. Buckley he was "too intelligent" to believe in God.)

The publication of Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market indicates that a belated but timely reconsideration of Rand's place in American cases for Rand's importance to the past 80 years of American intellectual and cultural life all the more convincing. That Rand's life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader's attention. As Burns puts it, "The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts."

Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926 and thoroughly reinvented herself in real life far more successfully than Jay Gatsby ever managed to do in fiction. Moving to Hollywood ……read more