Anne C. Heller - Ayn Rand and the World She Made

Praise for Anne C. Hellers
AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE

ABloombergBest Book of the Year
ALibrary JournalBest Book of the Year

Heller has taken the forbidding author of the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and made her real, a person of greater complexity than Rand herself would admit. She crafts a narrative that gains force from its engagement with Rands writing. Yet this is very much the story of Rands life, underscoring the contradictions between her strident philosophy and her very human, very messy existence. [A] fine work.

San Francisco Chronicle

Dramatic and very timely.

The New York Times Book Review

Offer[s] ammunition for fans and skeptics alike.

The Washington Post

A thoroughly researched, immensely readable portrait of a sui generis thinker who was fiercely committed to her ideals yet whose life contained fascinating contradictions.

The Wall Street Journals Speakeasy

The champion of individuality who insisted on obedience and conformity from her followers (including Alan Greenspan), Rand emerges from Hellers superbly vivid, enlightening, and affecting biography in all her paradoxical power.

Booklist (starred review)

Engrossing and unsparing, an excellent introductory course on Rand written with a shrewd eye.

New York Post

The exploits of Ayn Randthe Sarah Palin of philosophical fictionare made more gripping by Anne Hellers refusal to treat her subject as a joke and to accept her as the force she remains in politics (Tea Partiers) and to each successive generation of selfish undergrads.

Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery OConnor and frequent contributor to The Daily Beast

A comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rands personal life.

Time

One imagines that Rand would have approved of much of what Heller has written: the balanced tone of her book, its reasonableness, its respect for what a struggling Russian refugee accomplished and achieved. And yet having finished the biography, one can almost hear the impossible Rand railing against Hellers failure to award her the place she always believed she deserved in the pantheon of the most glorious, solitary, and self-made literary giants.

Bookforum

A thorough recounting of [Rands] life and the forces that shaped her philosophy. Fascinating.

The Dallas Morning News

Provides important and meaningful insight into the evolution of Rands worldview.

Newsweek

[A] work of historical scholarship that seek[s] to illuminate Rands complexities rather than simply to support or condemn her.

Harpers Magazine

Heller takes a dispassionate view of Rand and, in this detailed portrait, seeks to reveal her as a whole person rather than the cardboard cutout swathed in legend created by the great lady herself.

Bookreporter

Skillful. [A] detailed and engaging portrait of Rands interior life.

The New Republic

The picture of Rand that emerges from Ms. Hellers book is all the more damning because the biographer is obviously fair-minded and, indeed, something of an admirer of her subject.

The New Criterion

Worthwhile and engrossing.

City-Journal

[An] excellent biography. A vivid yet objective portrait of this gifted, brilliant, ultimately monstrous author. Brings to life not only Rand but her circle and their milieu, making the book readable if only for its glimpse into a not-so-distant past where serious literature was widely influential, the television new, the railroad a common mode of travel. Its strangely quaint to read about a world without computers or cell phones, a world where typists were a must and people wore hats as a matter of course. Even more extraordinary is [Hellers] rendition of this wildly divided woman, who could create some of our most unique literature yet remain unable to make that most fundamental of connections: unconditional love for another.

PopMatters.com

Anne C. Heller
AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE

Anne C. Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. She has been the managing editor of The Antioch Review, a fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, the features editor of Lears, and the executive editor of the magazine-development group at Cond Nast Publications, with a special emphasis on money and finance. It was Ayn Rands writing about money that first aroused her interest in the author, who is one of the most passionate defenders of capitalism of all time. Heller has written for a number of national magazines.

www.annecheller.com

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2010

Copyright 2009 by Anne C. Heller

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2009.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

constitute an extension of this copyright page.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:
Heller, Anne C.
Ayn Rand and the world she made /
Anne Conover Heller.1st ed.
p. cm.
(alk. paper)
1. Rand, Ayn. 2. Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. 3. PhilosophersUnited StatesBiography. 4. Objectivism (Philosophy). I. Title.
PS3535.A547Z68 2008
813.52dc22 [B] 2008027638

eISBN: 978-0-385-52946-4

Author photograph Brennan Cavanaugh
Title page photograph by Phyllis Cerf

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

For David Harter de Weese

Alas, that you would understand my word: Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1885