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

It’s about time someone wrote a “thorough and largely un­biased” biography of one of 20th-century America’s most influential political thinkers, said Brian Doherty in Reason.

(Oxford, 369 pages, $27.95)

It’s about time someone wrote a “thorough and largely un­biased” biography of one of 20th-century America’s most influential political thinkers, said Brian Doherty in Reason. Many books have been written about Ayn Rand, both by personal friends and ­“bitter enemies” of the controversial novelist and self-declared “radical for capitalism.” But this work, by “a serious American academic,” is smart and fair. It also often reads like fiction, said Nick Gillespie in The Wilson Quarterly. As Jennifer Burns tells it, the life of the woman who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged was even “more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted” than the novels’ wild plots.

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Rand’s anti-totalitarianism bred a subculture around her that “came to resemble a Soviet state in miniature,” said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. Rand asked her followers to regard her as a goddess of intellect, and frequently exploited them emotionally—and sexually. Though “possessed of looks that could be charitably described as unusual,” she persuaded a married acolyte 25 years her junior to join her in a long-term sexual relationship. She even coaxed the spurned spouse into accepting it. Rand’s philosophy may still live on in the hearts of many Americans. But, among her immediate circle of followers, that philosophic system seems to have fallen short “for the same reason communism failed”: It asked people to live in a way that didn’t come naturally.