Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

Author:Anne C. Heller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9781400078936
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2010-10-18T10:00:00+00:00

A few months before Atlas Shrugged was published, Bennett Cerf invited his “most interesting” new author to address a Random House sales conference. She stood at the head of the room and talked at length about the characters and meaning of her novel. When she finished, one salesman, still puzzled as to how to explain the book to bookstore owners, asked half-jokingly, “Miss Rand, could you give the essence of your philosophy while standing on one foot?” The salesman must have known that his question paraphrased the question asked of the legendary Israelite Rabbi Hillel, who, when challenged to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, replied, “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. That is the whole of the Torah. All the rest is commentary.” (Interestingly, the Christian Golden Rule is affirmative: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The problem with that, as George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, is that your neighbor may not want done to him what you want done to you. Hillel’s formulation is elegantly, and, when applied to Rand, suitably individualistic.) She gamely raised a leg and answered, “Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: self-interest. Politics: capitalism.” The sales staff applauded. Presumably, she was delighted by the classical reference as well as the applause.

As publication day approached, the excitement at the firm was palpable. Alan Collins and Bennett Cerf ordered cigarettes stamped with a gold dollar sign, like those smoked by the novel’s striking titans, and presented packages to Rand and guests at a surprise banquet in her honor at the Plaza Hotel. She was pleased when the Random House promotional staff collaborated with Branden and her husband to produce a billboard advertisement in which a glamorous portrait of Frank was overlaid with type that read, “This is John Galt—who said he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Meet him in Atlas Shrugged.” Advance orders from bookstores were unusually strong. As the initial printing of one hundred thousand copies came off the press, Cerf presented the very first to her. One early autumn evening, just before the book’s release to stores, Ayn, Frank, Barbara, and Nathaniel drove up Madison Avenue to see whether the book was in the display window on the ground floor of the Random House offices. It was there, all by itself in solitary splendor, wrapped in a green-blue cover designed by Frank. Barbara cried, “That’s us!” and Ayn roared with pleasure.

Atlas Shrugged was published on October 10, 1957. The reviews began to appear three days later, and the celebrations ended. They were not merely critical, they were hateful and dishonest. In The New York Times, Rand’s old nemesis from the 1930s, Granville Hicks, branded the novel “a demonstrative act rather than a literary novel,” a creation of demonic will “to crush the enemies of truth.” Without acknowledging the author’s nineteenth-century breadth of scope, her jaw-dropping integration of unfamiliar ideas into a drumbeat plot, or the

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