Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

This Octo­ber, Dou­ble­day and Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press are both releas­ing new titles on the life of Ayn Rand, best known as the author of The Foun­tain­head and Atlas Shrugged, and the cre­ator of Objec­tivism.

God­dess of the Mar­ket: Ayn Rand and the Amer­i­can Right (Jen­nifer Burns)

God­dess of the Mar­ket fol­lows Rand from her child­hood in Rus­sia through her rise from strug­gling Hol­ly­wood screen­writer to best­selling nov­el­ist, includ­ing the writ­ing of 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. 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. Read More.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Anne C. Heller)

In this biog­ra­phy, 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. Read More.