The Real Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was capitalism's Helen of Troy: the brain that launched a thousand wild ambitions. A Russian Jew forced to flee her home of St. Petersburg in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, Rand immigrated to a United States erupting in skyscrapers and highways and championed a new philosophy with man at its center and rationality, work, and self-interest as its principles. Novels like The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) set millions of feet marching to the beats of different drummers. If readers sometimes came for the volcanic sex scenes, they stayed for the titanic vision of individual achievement.

Anne C. Heller's new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), portrays the author as part god, part gorgon: a woman of powerful intellect and petty grievances who preached lofty individualism while demanding lockstep allegiance from her followers. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan recently visited Heller, a magazine editor and journalist who worked on the book for five years, to talk about Rand's life.

How did you become interested in Rand?

Until about 10 years ago, I had never read a word of her. Then I met Suze Orman while I was developing a personal finance magazine. Suze e-mailed me a copy of the famous speech from Atlas Shrugged in which Francisco d'Anconia defends making money as a moral act. The speech begins: "You think money is the root of all evil?" I intended to read only the first line, but I found myself reading the whole thing. I admired the pace and snap of the language. The argument was powerful. It represented things I didn't believe in but had no definitive argument against. And I loved parts of it, like where she says money will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. That struck me as wise and pertinent.

Until now, the only biographies of Rand appear to be the work of her disciples. How come?

Among people who write and publish serious biographies, Rand had not even been thought of. She is considered a writer of unpleasant, anticommunist potboilers. I belong to a biographers' group, and some of them were under the impression that she represented a "greed is good" philosophy and a Darwinian social code. I told them that I found her thinking more complex and challenging than they were giving her credit for. In any case, I wasn't promoting her or her ideas. I was writing objectively about her life and work.

A Book of the Month Club survey pegged Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book after the Bible.

I think Rand has this life-changing effect on people because many read her at a tender age. It's a time when they are trying to separate from their parents and the context of their childhood and to become somebody on their own. And her language is so uplifting -- it goes swooping up into the clouds when she talks about the characters she considers heroes. The reader travels along with her.

Entrepreneurs, in particular, love Rand. They buy her books in first editions. They name companies after her characters.

Rand would love what they are doing as well. I think part of her appeal is she gives people permission to do whatever they damn well want, so long as it's idealistic in some way. Rand's emphasis is on productive, original business. She ennobles something that might otherwise be treated as mundane. So entrepreneurs are inspired by the heroic enterprise in Atlas Shrugged. People became architects after reading The Fountainhead. She also teaches some very interesting lessons about punishing talent, that mediocre people try to drag down those who are more talented than they are.

Entrepreneurs love to talk about all the people who once called them crazy.

Rand was aware that most people prefer safety to risk. In her novels and nonfiction, she celebrated entrepreneurs as the productive engines and unsung heroes of 150 years of Western prosperity.

Rand wrote in a period when most people wanted safe jobs in large companies. Do you think her work ushered in, or at least presaged, the romantic idea of entrepreneurship that prevailed later in the century?

In the 1950s and 1960s, she was certainly the most visible proponent of the brainpower, courage, creativity, and vision she attributed to independent businessmen, and she fiercely defended their right to the wealth they generated. She also inspired the libertarian movement of the 1970s -- though she didn't approve of it -- which entrepreneurs often find sympathetic to their aims.

What would an Ayn Rand–style hero for postindustrial America look like? Which business or political leader comes closest?

Most important, a Randian hero operates outside the realm of government subsidies and government contracts. I imagine she would have loved Bill Gates in his early years. As to politicians, she liked very few, for reasons you can guess.

As you researched her life, what most surprised you?

Rand's mission was to create an "ideal man" and a microcosmic ideal world in Atlas Shrugged. When the culmination of her life's work was greeted with derision by the educational establishment, she lost much of her energy and curiosity. In many ways, she became a very ordinary person.

Rand seemed to presage the very contemporary idea of self as brand. To what extent did she anticipate the likes of Anthony Robbins and Oprah?

She had no wish to be at the center of an enterprise, except as it helped to spread her influence and ideas. Her longtime protégé and lover, Nathaniel Branden, was the one who launched her business ventures. Unlike her, he was a gifted promoter and businessman. He sold everything he could think of: reproductions of art and music she loved, tapes of her lectures -- only he had the brilliant idea of renting the tapes instead of selling them. So people would play the tapes for groups and charge admission, then send him back the tapes plus 50 percent of the profits. Rand's income from these ventures was small compared with sales of her books. But the tapes and music services helped keep those sales humming. And the art service sold prints of her husband's paintings.