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Summary
Summary
Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.
Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968.
One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009
One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009
"Excellent."
--Time magazine
"A terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century."
--The American Thinker
"A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles."
--Mises Economics Blog
Author Notes
Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She has published extensively on the history of conservative thought, and her podcasted lectures on American history have won an appreciative worldwide audience.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ayn Rand's most famous books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands every year, decades after they were issued. She was a significant influence on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Craigslist's Craig Newman. Rand remains many things to many people since her death in 1982, as she did throughout her prickly, anxiety-laced, amphetamine- and nicotine-fueled life. This biography and critique is exasperatingly detailed and slow-going at times. But what University of Virginia historian Burns does well is to explicate the evolution of Rand's individualist worldview, placing her within the context of American conservative and libertarian thought: from H.L. Mencken to William Buckley and later the Vietnam War-her opposition to it drove most conservatives crazy. Burns does not give short shrift to the men in Rand's life: her longtime husband, Frank O'Connor, and intellectual partner and lover, Nathaniel Branden. Overall, this contributes to an understanding of a complex life in relation to American conservatism. 12 b&w photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
In tracing the political and intellectual development of Ayn Rand (1905-82), Burns (history, Univ. of Virginia) begins with Rand's childhood in Russia, using it to illustrate how the author's experiences with communism shaped her thoughts about limited government and capitalism. Burns's access to previously unreleased papers and archives allows her to shed light on influences on Rand and on her conservative thought. She provides insight into the important people in Rand's life, individuals who helped shape her thinking--e.g., her husband Frank O'Connor, psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden, and writer Isabel Paterson. In addition to documenting Rand's writing process and the ways in which her major works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, developed and changed, the author delineates Rand's interest in film and her development as a screenwriter for Hollywood studios. Along the way, Burns details not only Rand's development--including the evolution of her philosophy of objectivism--but also changes in society. This is a significant contribution to Rand scholarship and an engaging read for anyone interested in Rand or 20th-century politics and intellectual life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; researchers and faculty; general readers. M. L. Jackson The University of Alabama
Library Journal Review
Twenty-five years after her death, Ayn Rand, novelist and creator of objectivist theory, is as revered and mocked a public intellectual as any of the 20th century. As the nation is caught in polarizing libertarian versus government debates, Rand is even more influential now than at the height of her popularity in the early 1960s. Here, Burns (history, Univ. of Virginia) produces a rigorously intellectual biography devoid of both condescension and deference. While Burns points out the inconsistency between Rand's belief in individualism and her demands for devout allegiance from like-minded fans, Burns gives credit to Rand's compelling rejection of state expansion when set against New Deal and Great Society currents. An early Goldwater enthusiast generally despised by the mainstream Right for her radical secularism, Rand had a fervor that was linked to her experience with Bolsheviks from whom she fled in the 1920s. Verdict Although dedicated Rand adherents and detractors will value Burns's depth, contextualization, and insightful interpretations, serious historians of American culture are the main audience for this excellent monograph.-Scott H. Silverman, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
Part I The Education of Ayn Rand, 1905-1943 | |
1 From Russia to Roosevelt | p. 9 |
2 Individualists of the World, Unite! | p. 39 |
3 A New Credo of Freedom | p. 67 |
Part II From Novelist to Philosopher, 1944 - 1957 | |
4 The Real Root of Evil | p. 99 |
5 A Round Universe | p. 133 |
Part III Who Is John Galt? 1957 - 1968 | |
6 Big Sister Is Watching You | p. 165 |
7 Radicals for Capitalism | p. 189 |
8 Love Is Exception Making | p. 214 |
Part IV Legacies | |
9 It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand | p. 247 |
Epilogue: Ayn Rand in American Memory | p. 279 |
Acknowledgments | p. 287 |
Essay on Sources | p. 291 |
Notes | p. 299 |
Bibliography | p. 345 |
Index | p. 361 |