Ayn Rand and the World She MAde

Zusatztext 77467719 Informationen zum Autor Anne C. Heller has written for such publications as Lear's , Mademoiselle , TriQuarterly , and Esquire . She is the former fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook , and a former executive editor at Condé Nast Publications. She lives in Manhattan. Klappentext A New York Times Notable Book A Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the YearAyn Rand's books have attracted three generations of readers, shaped the Libertarian movement, influenced White House economic policies throughout the Reagan years and beyond, and inspired the Tea Party movement. Yet twenty-eight years after her death, readers know very little about her life. In this seminal biography, Anne C. Heller traces the controversial author's life from her childhood in Bolshevik Russia to her years as a Hollywood screenwriter, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that worshipped her in the 1950s and 1960s. Based on original research in Russia and scores of interviews with Rand's acquaintances and former acolytes, Ayn Rand and the World She Made is a comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and improbable figures of the twentieth century. Leseprobe chapter 1 ONE BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 19051917 y If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism. I was born with that obsession and have never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and more tragically needed. Call it fate or irony, but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia. Autobiographical, Sketch, 1936 When the fierce and extraordinary Ayn Rand was fifty-two years old, about to become world famous, and more than thirty years removed from her birthplace in Russia, she summed up the meaning of her elaborate, invented, cerebral world this way: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. It was a world in which no dictator, no deity, and no well-meaning sense of duty would ever take away the moral right of the gifted individualAyn Randto live according to her own high-wattage lights. This was not the world she was born into. Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Russian Jew, on February, 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, then the capital city of the most anti-Semitic and politically divided nation on the European continent. Later, she would say that she loathed everything Russian, and while this was not entirely trueshe retained her appetite for Russian classical music and Russian sweets until the end of her lifeshe hated the passivity, brutality, and primitive religiosity of the Russia of her youth. She had good reason for this. Her birth came barely three weeks after the brief but bloody uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, where, on a bright January Sunday morning, twelve thousand of Czar Nicholas II's cavalrymen opened fire on thirty thousand factory workers, their wives and children, labor organizers, and students who had walked to the Winter Palace to petition for better working conditions and a role in the czar's all-powerful government. The protest was led by a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, and many marchers were said to be praying as they died. The slaughter gave rise to days of rioting throughout the city and set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which would end not in the quick and brutal suppression of the rebellion's leaders, as this one did, but in a revol...

“Splendid. . . . A cleanly and compellingly written biography of one of the strangest, most controversial and most widely read writers of the 20th century.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A thoughtful, flesh-and-blood portrait of an extremely complicated and self-contradictory woman, coupling this character study with literary analysis and plumbing the quirkier depths of Rand’s prodigious imagination.” —The New York Times

“Heller does a remarkable job with a subject who was almost cripplingly complex—a real woman starring in her own propaganda film.” —New York magazine
 
“[An] outstanding biography that reveals much about a figure who to this point has been chronicled only by biased disciples.” —Washington Monthly 
 
“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 Journal’s Speakeasy
 
“The champion of individuality who insisted on obedience and conformity from her followers (including Alan Greenspan), Rand emerges from Heller’s 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 Rand—the Sarah Palin of philosophical fiction—are made more gripping by Anne Heller’s 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 O’Connor and frequent contributor to The Daily Beast
 
“A comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand’s 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 Heller’s 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 [Rand’s] life and the forces that shaped her philosophy. . . . Fascinating.” —Dallas Morning News
 
“Provides important and meaningful insight into the evolution of Rand’s world view.” —Newsweek
 
“[A] work of historical scholarship that seek[s] to illuminate Rand’s complexities rather than simply to support or condemn her.” —Harper’s 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.com
 
“Skillful. . . . [A] detailed and engaging portrait of Rand’s interior life.” —The New Republic
 
“The picture of Rand that emerges from Ms. Heller’s 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.” —Ci…

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