The Gospel According to Ayn Rand

a TN Che Gospel ~: ACCORdING FTO ayn rand SK SK MK OK M. STANTON EVANS | Dy oo EEK SE Who is Ayn Rand? The question, which echoes the tag- line of Miss Rand’s most massive book and forms the title of an admiring study by her colleague Nathaniel Branden, needs answering. Most peo- ple know, of course, the surface data of Miss Rand’s career. She is a famous novelist, a former writer for motion pictures, an expatriate from Russia with a Russian taste for long pro- phetic fiction. So much is clear.

Where she fits in the conceptual scheme of American politics is, how- ever, more difficult to say. For Miss Rand is a kind of philosophical enigma —an anti-collectivist who proclaims herself, and is in turn proclaimed, an enemy to conservatives. That mix- ture of attributes has stirred con- troversy on the American Right ever since Whittaker Chambers reviewed her enormous novel, Atlas Shrugged, in the pages of this magazine some ten years ago this December.

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About the Author

M. Stanton Evans

a TN Che Gospel ~: ACCORdING FTO ayn rand SK SK MK OK M. STANTON EVANS | Dy oo EEK SE Who is Ayn Rand? The question, which echoes the tag- line of Miss Rand’s most massive book and forms the title of an admiring study by her colleague Nathaniel Branden, needs answering. Most peo- ple know, of course, the surface data of Miss Rand’s career. She is a famous novelist, a former writer for motion pictures, an expatriate from Russia with a Russian taste for long pro- phetic fiction. So much is clear.

Where she fits in the conceptual scheme of American politics is, how- ever, more difficult to say. For Miss Rand is a kind of philosophical enigma —an anti-collectivist who proclaims herself, and is in turn proclaimed, an enemy to conservatives. That mix- ture of attributes has stirred con- troversy on the American Right ever since Whittaker Chambers reviewed her enormous novel, Atlas Shrugged, in the pages of this magazine some ten years ago this December.