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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
The novels by Russian immigrant writer Ayn Rand (1905–82) still attract a large readership, not least thanks to a recent renaissance of libertarian ideas in the US. Was it Rand's intention, when writing her novels, to construct political tracts, as many insinuate, or was she indeed trying to imitate her literary idols, as she herself claimed? The answer is complicated due to Rand's own contradictory statements on fiction's impact. Although Rand suggested that it was the reader who gave text meaning, she also believed her books to have an unambiguous message that should have a distinct effect on the reader.
1 Tuccille, Jerome, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 13Google Scholar.
2 Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet Books, 1996; first published 1957)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
3 Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead (London: Penguin Books, 2007; first published 1943)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
4 Heller, Anne C., Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, and Auckland: Nan A. Talese, 2009), xiiGoogle Scholar.
5 Ibid., xii.
6 See press release by the Ayn Rand Institute, 21 Jan. 2010, at www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=24817.
7 Each movie has its website: www.atlasshruggedpart1.com and http://atlasshruggedpart2.com.
8 Burns, Jennifer, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4Google Scholar.
9 The two biographies in question are by Burns and Heller, cited above. A notable exception is also the work by scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein; see for instance The New Ayn Rand Companion, rev. edn (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1999); and Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto of the Mind (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000).
10 Most notably Walker, Jeff, The Ayn Rand Cult (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1999)Google Scholar.
11 Best known are the biographies written by Rand's once closest disciples, Barbara and Nathaniel Branden: Branden, Barbara, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Anchor Books, 1986)Google Scholar; and Branden, Nathaniel, My Years with Ayn Rand (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999; first published 1989)Google Scholar. See also Smith, Tara, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. An interesting forum for Rand scholars is the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and Robert Mayhew coedited several volumes on Rand's prose, namely essays on Anthem, We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged (all published by Lexington Books).
12 O'Neill, William F., With Charity toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand's Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co.), 3Google Scholar.
13 Harold Strauss, “Soviet Triangle”, New York Times, 19 April 1936, BR7.
14 Granville Hicks, “A Parable of Buried Talents,” New York Times, 13 Oct. 1957, 266.
15 Ibid.
16 Fletcher, Max E., “Harriet Martineau and Ayn Rand: Economics in the Guise of Fiction,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 33, 4 (1974), 367–79, 368Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., 367. Fletcher's arguments were addressed in two papers by Objectivist scholars, namely John B. Ridpath and James G. Lennox, the latter being cofounder of the Ayn Rand Society. See Ridpath, John B., “Fletcher's Views on the Novelist's Aesthetic Purpose in Writing,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 35, 2 (1976), 213–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lennox, James G., “Fletcher's Oblique Attack on Ayn Rand's Economics and Ethics,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 35, 2 (1976), 217–24Google Scholar.
18 Cited in Walker, 330.
19 Rand, Ayn, Night of January 16th, in Three Plays: Night of January 16th – Ideal – Think Twice (New York: Signet, 2005), 3–88Google Scholar.
20 Rand, Ayn, We the Living (New York: Signet, 1996; first published 1936)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
21 Rand, Ayn, Anthem (London: Penguin Classics, 2008; first published 1938)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
22 Rand, Ayn, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers (New York: Plume, 2000)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
23 Interestingly, her mentor Isabel Paterson came to a similar conclusion in her column “Turns with a Bookworm”: “The mere fact that a book does not sell is not a guarantee of literary quality.” Quoted in Cox, Stephen, “Representing Isabel Paterson,” American Literary History, 17, 2 (2005), 244–58, 252Google Scholar.
24 The pages dedicated to Vesta Dunning have been published in Rand, Ayn, The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction (New York: Signet, 2005; revised and expanded edition), 440–76Google Scholar.
25 Rand, The Early Rand, 443, cites the play as “Joan d'Arc.”
26 See also Peikoff, Leonard, “Editor's Preface,” in Rand, , The Early Ayn Rand, 431–39, 434Google Scholar.
27 Instead of many see Rand, Ayn, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 104–36Google Scholar.
28 Vesta recites the passage when Joan of Arc offers to lead the troupes into the battle which she is convinced to win: “We'll lift together / the siege of Orleans and win the freedom / I am alone to see and to believe.” Rand, The Early Ayn Rand, 441.
29 Crosby, Donald H., “The Creative Kinship of Schiller and Kleist,” Monatshefte, 53, 5 (1971), 255–64Google Scholar.
30 It is well established that the history of literature, particularly the history of the novel, cannot be discussed independently of that of the individual, ranging from the heroic individuals populating novels to the individual that crafts fictitious worlds for the secluded reader. For more thereon see Berman, Russell A., Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 23Google Scholar; Zuckert, Catherine, “On Reading Classic American Novelists as Political Thinkers,” Journal of Politics, 43, 3 (1981), 683–706, 692CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Alternatively spelt “Gosizdat.”
32 See, for instance, Pospielovsky, Dimitry, “From Gosizdat to Samizdat and Tamizdat,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des slavistes, 20, 1 (1977), 44–62Google Scholar.
33 For a concise account of the changing publishing and translating policies in the 1920s and 1930s see Safiullina, Nailya and Platonov, Rachel, “Literary Translation and Soviet Cultural Politics in the 1930s: The Role of the Journal Internacional'naja literatura,” Russian Literature, 72, 2 (2012), 239–69Google Scholar, esp. 240–48.
34 Rideout, Walter, The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 170Google Scholar.
35 Blotner, Joseph Leo, The Political Novel (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1955), 48Google Scholar.
36 Bridge, John Whalen, Political Fiction and the American Self (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 75Google Scholar.
37 See, for instance, Nora Ephron's review in the New York Times: “I am forced to conclude that [The Fountainhead] is better read when one is young enough to miss the point … It is a ridiculous book. It is also quite obviously a book by an author whose previous work readers have missed the point of. It is impossible to miss the point of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ Nevertheless, it is a book that cannot be put down, and therefore probably should not be picked up in the first place.” Nora Ephron, “A Strange Kind of Simplicity,” New York Times, 5 May 1968, BR8, 42.
38 Whalen Bridge, 5–6.
39 Howe, Irving, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002; first published 1957), 20Google Scholar.
40 Orwell, George, Why I Write (London: Penguin, 2005; first published 1946), 4–5Google Scholar.
41 Burns, Goddess of the Market, 78. Stephen Cox corroborates Burns's account in his seminal biography of Isabel Paterson, The Woman and the Dynamo (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2004). Paterson has, however, also benefited from the exchange with Rand, who later reviewed her mentor's most important work, The God of the Machine (1943).
42 Clipping on file in the Isabel M. Paterson Papers, Box 6, at the Herber Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, page number no longer legible.
43 Letter to Ayn Rand from 21 March 1944; the letter is part of the Isabel Paterson Papers, Box 4, archived at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa.
44 Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet Books, 1975; first published 1969), 201, emphasis in original. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
45 Burns, 92, original emphasis.
46 Ibid., 95.
47 Rand, Ayn, Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A (New York: Signet Book, 2005), 201Google Scholar. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.
48 Nichols, Lewis, “Talk with Ayn Rand,” New York Times, 13 Oct. 1957, 272Google Scholar.
49 Fish, Stanley Eugene, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 3Google Scholar.
50 Podritske, Marlene and Schwartz, Peter, eds., Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 128–29Google Scholar , 95.
51 Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Column: Written for the Los Angeles Times, rev. edn (New Milford, CT: Second Renaissance Books; first published 1991), 43. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.
52 Thus Rand in “Introduction to Calumet ‘K’,” The Objectivist, Oct. 1967, 6.
53 Samuel Merwin, Calumet “K” (Hamburg: tradition, 2006).
54 Torres, Louis and Kamhi, Michelle Marder, What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2000), 63–64Google Scholar.
55 Nussbaum, Martha C., Poetic Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 5Google Scholar.
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