Passion of Ayn Rand

Introduction The life of Ayn Rand was the material of fiction. But if one attempted to write it as a novel, the result would be preposterously unbelievable. Everything about her life and her person was of an epic scale. Her seventy-seven years encompassed the outer limits of triumph and defeat, of exaltation and tragedy, of passionate love and intransigent hatred, of dedicated effort and despairing passivity. Her person encompassed the grandeur of the heroes of her novels, their iron determination, their vast powers of intellect and imagination, their impassioned pursuit of their goals, their worship of achievement, their courage, their pride, and their love of life--as well as the terrors, the self-doubts, the lack of emotional balance, the private agonies that are so alien to an Ayn Rand hero. Her virtues were larger than life--and so were her shortcomings. Few figures in this century have been so admired and so savagely attacked. She is viewed as goddess and as malefactor, as a seminal genius and an ominously dangerous corrupter of the young, as the mightiest of voices for reason and the destroyer of traditional values, as the espouser of joy and the exponent of mindless greed, as the great defender of freedom and the introducer of malevolent values into the mainstream of American thought. It is all but impossible to find a neutral voice among the millions who have read her works; each reader takes an unequivocal stand for or against that which she represents. When her name is mentioned in any gathering, it is met with explosions of grateful, loving admiration or enraged disapproval. In the course of conducting more than two hundred interviews with people whose lives were touched by her or by her work, I have yet to encounter a single person who spoke of her with indifference. Yet despite the furor her ideas have generated--despite the fact that they fill the pages of thirteen books, which, as of this writing, have sold more than twenty million copies--despite the fact that her philosophy has had a powerful and still-accelerating influence on the culture in which we live--little is known about the human being who was Ayn Rand. Still less is known about the woman who was Ayn Rand. Her public and professional activities took place on a lighted stage; her private life was lived backstage, curtained from view. I first met Ayn Rand in 1950. At the age of forty-five, she had already achieved a singular renown as the author ofThe Fountainhead, and was writing her magnum opus,Atlas Shrugged--the work that was to skyrocket her to international fame and place her in the center of a hurricane of controversy. I was attending UCLA with my friend and later my husband, Nathaniel Branden. I was majoring in philosophy, he in psychology. We had both readThe Fountainhead--and thenWe the LivingandAnthem, Ayn Rand's two earlier novels--and we deeply admired and were influenced by her work. Learning that she was living in Southern California, Nathaniel wrote her a letter, asking philosophical questions aboutThe FountainheadandWe the Living. Impressed with his questions, she arranged to meet with him; a week later, I joined them for a second meeting. It was the beginning of an intimate friendship with Ayn and her husband, Frank O'Connor, lasting across nineteen years, during which we met with Ayn or spoke with her by telephone almost every day; for a number of years, we lived in the same New York apartment building. I was engaged in the passions and pains of Ayn's life, first as her student and later as teacher of her philosophy. We became privy to each other's personal and professional lives, to each other's joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats. It was the beginning of the endless captivation of observing at close hand the unfolding of a great and growing literary and philosophical talent, of a mind of towering intellectual power, of a tormented, passionBranden, Barbara is the author of 'Passion of Ayn Rand' with ISBN 9780385243889 and ISBN 038524388X.