By 1935, her play The Night of January 16th, a courtroom drama in which the audience voted on the verdict for an accused murderer each night, was a minor hit on Broadway. On a movie set, Rand met the man who would become her husband, an unambitious bit player named Frank O’Connor who nonetheless became the model for her relentlessly proactive, sexually rapacious heroes. DeMille and, despite her heavily accented English, talked her way into a job reading scripts for him. Moving to Hollywood to be in the film industry, she met legendary director Cecil B. As Burns puts it, “The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.”īorn 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. 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. 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. Buckley he was “too intelligent” to believe in God.) And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. 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. Yet over the years, Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. 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.
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