In 1921, Bernard Baruch, who had made his fortune on Wall Street, asked Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, if he had been “over into Russia”? In his Autobiography, Steffens recalled that he had “answered very literally, ‘I have been over into the future, and it works’”. That same year, the Rosenbaum family, who before the Revolution had lived a comfortable middle-class life under the tsar, returned to Petrograd from the Crimea, where they had temporarily relocated in the hope of escaping the communist takeover. With them was their daughter, Alisa, then aged sixteen. Five years later, having concluded that her future in Russia was unworkable, she left for America, reinventing herself on the way as Ayn Rand. She never went back.
Jennifer Burns's intellectual biography of Rand is meticulously researched, well written and even-handed in its treatment of one of the more controversial characters on the American Right. Goddess of the Market does ample justice to the fascinating life of a remarkable woman, whose inner circle of admirers at one time included Alan Greenspan. Through The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand's populist appeal remains perennially strong: indeed sales of her later book surged during the 2008 financial meltdown. When she died in 1982, a giant wreath shaped into a dollar sign was placed next to her coffin. As Burns correctly concludes, Rand “is likely to remain what she has always been, a fertile touchstone of the American imagination” (286).
In America, Rand initially lodged with relatives in Chicago: the Portnoys. Their complaint was the noise of her incessant typewriting. They gave her a train ticket to Hollywood. A budding career as a screenwriter and playwright was soon overshadowed by her fiction writing. Rand's novels expounded the virtue of selfishness, expatiated on the merits of capitalism and excoriated the meddlesome state activities that threatened the creativity of her entrepreneurial heroes.
Her timing was immaculate. The Fountainhead was published as the ideological battles of the Cold War took shape. Rand's star rose. She joined the executive committee of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (along with Ronald Reagan). But increasingly she preferred a semi-reclusive life, dominating a small group of acolytes – “the Collective.” Outside this curious, hermetically sealed world, her philosophy of “objectivism,” promoted most assiduously and profitably by Nathaniel Branden until the acrimonious end of their long-standing affair, was for the most part dismissed by the academic establishment. Nevertheless Rand remained a cult figure among students on many American university campuses.
The distant relatives who donated the fare which took her to California; Cecil B. De Mille, who on a whim offered a lift in his car and a job as an extra; and Archie Ogden, the editor at Bobbs-Merrill who persuaded the publishing house to take on an unfinished first novel, all gave Rand the chance to live out her idiosyncratic version of the American Dream. Did she appreciate that even the most extreme apostle of individualism may sometimes be helped by the kindness of strangers?
