Ayn Rand Book Review

I found this review of a new biography on Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C. Heller) very interesting. Perhaps the book is also interesting.

"Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished." [I had this feeling after reading The Fountainhead in my early twenties.....of course I was wrong.....]

"The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect." [Thought in roarkian terms for a month or so after reading the book.....]

"But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration...Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre." [Not really, capitalists probably have more than one value to which they are dedicated...this is sort of a cartoon stereotyping of capitalists....]

"At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie­tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”)." [Yes, I read the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead and she explained just this in her preface, something I found absurd after reading the book. Nietzsche, or at least a vulgar Nietzsche, are all over the pages of this book.....]

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