Free Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Introduction
    HER EYES WERE what everyone noticed first. Dark and widely set, they dominated her plain, square face. Her “glare would wilt a cactus,” declared Newsweek magazine, but to Ayn Rand’s admirers, her eyes projected clairvoyance, insight, profundity. “When she looked into my eyes, she looked into my soul, and I felt she saw me,” remembered one acquaintance. Readers of her books had the same feeling. Rand’s words could penetrate to the core, stirring secret selves and masked dreams. A graduate student in psychology told her, “Your novels have had a profound influence on my life. It was like being reborn. . . . What was really amazing is that I don’t remember ever having read a book from cover to cover. Now, I’m just the opposite. I’m always reading. I can’t seem to get enough knowledge.” Sometimes Rand provoked an adverse reaction. The libertarian theorist Roy Childs was so disturbed by The Fountainhead’ s atheism that he burned the book after finishing it. Childs soon reconsidered and became a serious student and vigorous critic of Rand. Her works launched him, as they did so many others, on an intellectual journey that lasted a lifetime. 1
    Although Rand celebrated the life of the mind, her harshest critics were intellectuals, members of the social class into which she placed herself. Rand was a favorite target of prominent writers and critics on both the left and the right, drawing fire from Sidney Hook, Whittaker Chambers, Susan Brownmiller, and William F. Buckley Jr. She gave as good as she got, calling her fellow intellectuals “frightened zombies” and “witch doctors.” 2 Ideas were the only thing that truly mattered, she believed, both in a person’s life and in the course of history. “What are your premises?” was her favorite opening question when she met someone new.
    Today, more than twenty years after her death, Rand remains shrouded in both controversy and myth. The sales of her books areextraordinary. In 2008 alone combined sales of her novels Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem topped eight hundred thousand, an astonishing figure for books published more than fifty years ago. 3 A host of advocacy organizations promote her work, and rumors swirl about a major motion picture based on Atlas Shrugged . The blogosphere hums with acrimonious debate about her novels and philosophy. In many ways, Rand is a more active presence in American culture now than she was during her lifetime.
    Because of this very longevity, Rand has become detached from her historical context. Along with her most avid fans, she saw herself as a genius who transcended time. Like her creation Howard Roark, Rand believed, “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.” She made grandiose claims for Objectivism, her fully integrated philosophical system, telling the journalist Mike Wallace, “If anyone can pick a rational flaw in my philosophy, I will be delighted to acknowledge him and I will learn something from him.” Until then, Rand asserted, she was “the most creative thinker alive.” 4 The only philosopher she acknowledged as an influence was Aristotle. Beyond his works, Rand insisted that she was unaffected by external influences or ideas. According to Rand and her latter-day followers, Objectivism sprang, Athena-like, fully formed from the brow of its creator.
    Commentary on Rand has done little to dispel this impression. Because of her extreme political views and the nearly universal consensus among literary critics that she is a bad writer, few who are not committed Objectivists have taken Rand seriously. Unlike other novelists of her stature, until now Rand has not been the subject of a full-length biography. Her life and work have been described instead by her former friends, enemies, and students. Despite her emphasis on integration, most of the books published about Rand have been essay collections