Ayn Rand and the world she made

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“Famous for her credo of individualism and unbridledcapitalism, novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand nevertalked about her life as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum,an awkward and offbeat Russian Jewish girl of startlingintelligence. Yet Heller believes that Rand’s adamantself-regard and vehement protest against any form ofcollectivism or social conscience are rooted in her family’ssuffering in early-twentieth-century Russia, whereJews were violently persecuted and personal freedomwas abolished. Heller is the first to fully investigate andvigorously chronicle Rand’s willful life and phenomenaland controversial achievements, from her sense ofdestiny (by age 11 she had already written four novels)to her arrival in America at age 21 in 1926, her workin Hollywood, and her reign in New York as a cultfigurehead. Heller also offers arresting analyses of TheFountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s critically condemnedyet perpetually popular and enormously influentialnovels of erotic melodrama and self-aggrandizingideology. But the heart of the book is the wrenchingstory of Rand’s marriage to long-suffering FrankO’Connor and her affair with the much younger manwho packaged and peddled her beliefs as Objectivism.The champion of individuality who insisted on obedienceand conformity from her followers (includingAlan Greenspan), Rand emerges from Heller’s superblyvivid, enlightening, and affecting biography in all herparadoxical power.”- Excerpt from Booklist review“[An] excellent biography.... A comprehensivestudy, in novelistic detail, of Rand’s personallife.”—Time Magazine

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Anne C. Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. Shehas been the managing editor of The Antioch Review, afiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, the features editorof Lear’s, and the executive editor of the magazinedevelopment group at Conde Nast Publications, witha special emphasis on money and finance. It was AynRand’s writing about money that first aroused herinterest in the author, who is one of the most passionatedefenders of capitalism of all time. Heller has writtenfor a number of national magazines.