The extent of her influence was demonstrated this week when Paul Ryan joined the Mitt Romney ticket, although he has now distanced himself from her work.
In , Ryan told the Atlas Society how Rand "taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are". But earlier this year, he told the National Review that as a Catholic he rejected her atheism.
Beyond politics, the novel also had an impact in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs identified with its emphasis on heroic individuals and their work ethic.
Some have named their companies or their newborn children after the author or her characters. It's less about the economy or your relationship with government, so there is very little in Ayn Rand that they could identify with. Paul Ryan genuinely fell out of love with Randian ideas, says Stanley, and that comes with age. She massages the egos of juveniles. The emergence of the Tea Party - a wing of the Republican Party which favours a shrinking of the state - appears to be driving her recent resurgence.
John Galt is often referred to on placards and T-shirts. In Rand's later life, her followers turned away from her - some were appalled to learn she had been conducting a year affair with her associate Nathaniel Branden, apparently with the consent of her own husband and Branden's wife, Rand's close friend Barbara.
Others were put off for other reasons. One former acolyte, Jerome Tuccille, recalls supporters being "robotic" in their admiration and after two or three years, he turned his attention to less "flawed" libertarian causes.
She wasn't open to debate but trounced them as irrational, altruistic and hopeless. She took on her soon-to-be-famous pen name and, after a few months in Chicago, moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter.
Following a chance encounter with Hollywood titan Cecil B. They married in , and she became an American citizen in Rand landed a job as a clerk at RKO Pictures, eventually rising to head of the wardrobe department, and continued developing her craft as a writer.
She soon completed a courtroom drama called Penthouse Legend , which featured the gimmick of audience members serving as the jury. Around this time, Rand also completed her first novel, We the Living. Published in after several rejections, We the Living championed the moral authority of the individual through its heroine's battles with a Soviet totalitarian state. Rand followed with the novella Anthem , about a future collectivist dystopia in which "I" has been stamped out of the language.
The result, after years of writing and more rejections, was The Fountainhead. While not an immediate success, The Fountainhead eventually achieved strong sales, and at the end of the decade became a feature film, with Gary Cooper in the role of Roark.
Rand's ideas became even more explicit with the publication of Atlas Shrugged. A massive work of more than 1, pages, Atlas Shrugged portrays a future in which leading industrialists drop out of a collectivist society that exploits their talents, culminating with a notoriously lengthy speech by protagonist John Galt. The novel drew some harsh reviews, but became an immediate best seller.
Around , Rand met with a college student named Nathan Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Branden and became the author's designated heir. Along with his wife, Barbara, Braden formed a group that met at Rand's apartment to engage in intellectual discussions. Rand soon honed her philosophy of what she termed "Objectivism": a belief in a concrete reality, from which individuals can discern existing truths, and the ultimate moral value of the pursuit of self interest.
Ayn Rand by Tibor Machan Essays on We the Living by Robert Mayhew Judgment Day by Nathaniel Branden Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed. Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz, eds. Lexington Books, Also issued in Kindle eBook format on Amazon. This is a transcription of the original NBI set of lectures. October 14, A RI Press release.
Yet another detail expands the number of readers over the numbers of books sold. When teaching middle school in Albuquerque , I saw cartloads of Anthem coming and going as assigned reading along with other easy books such as Call of the Wild and Animal Farm. How many young people come to Ayn Rand's ideas via this route cannot be tallied by book sales alone.
Considering the assigned reading from middle school through college, we have to at least recognize the CliffsNotes, Monarch Notes, and Sparknotes for Anthem , The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. A recent Zogby Poll raised more questions. The numbers at the top actually indicate that anyone who buys Anthem , The Fountainhead , or Atlas Shrugged will buy the other two, though not always.
Sales of Atlas slightly outpace the others. I also believe from the numbers that while only a few may buy Philosophy: Who Needs It? That points to the claim at the top that 40 million books sold might reveal only four million people with a passion for Ayn Rand: I own 20 different titles by and about.
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