Reason magazine links to Nick Gillespie’s review of two new biographies of the Mother of Objectivism:
In The Wilson Quarterly, Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie reviews two brand-spankin’ new (and largely sympathetic) biographies of Ayn Rand. A snippet:
Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the “greatest books” of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. During the height of the Cold War, she managed to alienate leftists by insisting that capitalism was not simply more productive but more moral than socialism or a mixed economy because it allowed the individual to express himself most fully. And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. (She once told William F. Buckley he was “too intelligent” to believe in God.)
The publication of Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market indicates that a belated but timely reconsideration of Rand’s place in American cases for Rand’s importance to the past 80 years of American intellectual and cultural life all the more convincing. That Rand’s life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader’s attention. As Burns puts it, “The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.”
Accompanying the post is a reprint of one of Reason’s 1973-era covers featuring a posterized version of Ayn Rand, prompting a commenter to note how much she’d love a Che-style T-shirt featuring Rand. Should take you about ten minutes in Photoshop to put the art together for that one, as the quick mock-up above illustrates.
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