Love her or loathe her, Ayn Rand is an undeniably influential figure. Her contemporary admirers range from celebrities – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe – to politicians, including Donald Trump. Cultural commentator Lisa Duggan has called her “the ultimate mean girl”.
Rand was implacably opposed to all forms of altruism, social welfare programs and governmental oversight. She also harboured a lifelong hatred of communism. She was “one of the first American writers to celebrate the creative possibilities of modern capitalism and to emphasize the economic value of independent thought,” according to intellectual biographer Jennifer Burns.
And while Rand founded a philosophical movement, Objectivism, which privileged the “concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life”, her ideas are not the key to her influence. Her “blockbuster” novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), lie “at the heart of her incalculable impact,” as Duggan writes.
