Ayn Rand - Hardcover

Heller, Ann C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385513992 ISBN 13: 9780385513999

Publisher: Nan A Talese, 2010

Synopsis

Ayn Rand is best known as the author of the perennially bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Altogether, more than 12 million copies of the two novels have been sold in the United States. The books have attracted three generations of readers, shaped the foundation of the Libertarian movement, and influenced White House economic policies throughout the Reagan years and beyond. A passionate advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and individual rights, Rand remains a powerful force in the political perceptions of Americans today. Yet twenty-five years after her death, her readers know little about her life.

In this seminal biography, Anne C. Heller traces the controversial author’s life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, Heller reveals previously unknown facts about Rand’s history and looks at Rand with new research and a fresh perspective.

Based on original research in Russia, dozens of interviews with Rand’s acquaintances and former acolytes, and previously unexamined archives of tapes and letters, 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.

About this title

Review:

"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
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"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 "
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"Offer[s] ammunition for fans and skeptics alike." --"The Washington Post "
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"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)
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"Engrossing and unsparing, an excellent introductory course on Rand written with a shrewd eye." --"New York Post "
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"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""
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"A comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand's pers

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nan A Talese
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0385513992
• ISBN 13: 9780385513999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 592