Anne Heller - Ayn Rand and the World She Made

“very good—to be answered”:Videotaped interview with Robert Hessen by Duncan Scott, OHP, November 10, 2004.

Nickerson began to attend: 100 Voices , Kathleen and Richard Nickerson, p. 180.

“spiritual bodyguard”:Author interview with NB, December 11, 2008.

“desperately”:Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.

paid little attention to girls:Author interviews with BB (October 14, 2007) and others.

“devastating”:Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.

“who neither agrees or disagrees”: AS , p. 971.

“kangaroo courts”:Ayn Rand and Her Movement,” p. 8.

Peikoff was a particular target: MYWAR , p. 158.

“When she laid out her argument”:Author interview with BB, December 16, 2005.

“The six months I had spent”:Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.

“he regards reason and emotion as antagonists”: MYWAR , p. 165.

he who “pulled the trigger”: MYWAR , p. 172.

that is, Albert Jay Nock’s Remnant:AR’s returning strikers mirror Nock’s Remnant of conservative true believers who will one day redeem the world, a tribute she may be slyly acknowledging when she writes, in John Galt’s speech, “Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, your mind” (AS , p. 932).

“If anyone should ask me”:“The Goal of My Writing,” The Romantic Manifesto , p. 172.

“Those who are anti-business are anti-life”:Letter to John Chamberlain, November 27, 1948 (LOAR , p. 413).

decided not to show the text: JD , p. 201.

“To the glory of mankind”: AS , p. 385.

“the book is unsaleable and un-publishable”: TPOAR , p. 284.

tripped over itself to court her: TPOAR , p. 285.

dozen companies phoned or wrote:Reported by BC in a 1971 oral history interview from which his memoir At Random (1977) was taken; recorded by Robin Hawkins, 1968, for the Columbia University Oral History Project, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, used by permission of Christopher Cerf; number 719, p. 945.

Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, were Communists: Words & Faces , p. 260. In his oral history interview, BC said that AR had explained to Hiram Haydn that, in Cerf’s words, “her sycophants had told her that we were way over on the left” (p. 944). In TPOAR , BB writes that the novelist had long considered Random House to be a left-wing publisher (p. 285).

“the exact replica”: Words & Faces , p. 257.

she tolerated him [Hayden]:Although “he would not have known it,” BB recalled, “she didn’t like him.” In fact, “with a few exceptions, I can’t remember her ever saying that she liked someone without adding a list of qualifications” (author correspondence with BB, June 26, 2008).

lunch took place in the Trianon Room: Words & Faces , p. 260.

“an infinite number” of questions:Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977).

was delighted with his answer: Words & Faces , p. 261.

“nobody is going to try to censor you”: At Random . BC later claimed that he meant he would publish anything she wrote as fiction .

posthumously published memoir: At Random was edited by Christopher Cerf and published posthumously, based on BC’s oral history interview on file at Columbia University’s Oral History Project, number 719.

“They spoke as I would want”: TPOAR , p. 286.

To all of these terms the men agreed:Internal memo, Bennett Cerf Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 57.

should not exceed 600,000 words:Letter to AR from BC (Bennett Cerf Collection, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 57).

“This is life as it should be”: JD , p. 202.

“They didn’t pretend to be converted”: TPOAR , p. 288.

“What I loved to do”:BC’s oral history interview, p. 943.

“she peers right through you”:BC’s oral history interview, p. 944.

“a remarkable woman”:Donald Klopfer, in an oral history interview on file at the Columbia University Oral History Project archives, number 1091, p. 79.

a spell of bright optimism: TPOAR , p. 290.

“I am challenging the cultural tradition”: TPOAR , p. 294.

“Whether or not the world”:Unpublished letter to AR from BB, August 29, 1951, courtesy of MSC.

foresaw a renaissance of political liberty: TPOAR , p. 294; author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.

Alan Greenspan: MYWAR , p. 167.

He often said that Ayn Rand put the moral basis:Author interview with JMB, March 23, 2004. “I was limited until I met her,” Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin Press). “Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do, and why they do it. … She introduced me to a vast realm from which I’d shut myself off” (p. 53).

Until 2008: NYT , October 23, 2008; TON , August 1963, p. 31.

early months of 1957:First draft of AS (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 11, folders 10–12).

he would slip away to paint: TPOAR , p. 281; “Portrait of An Artist,” p. 1.

what she called his “exalted sense of life”: Facets of Ayn Rand , p. 119.

“There were no historical influences at all in his work”: WIAR , p. 230. Since this book was written under AR’s supervision and with her guidance, this view of FO’s originality was almost surely hers.

he enrolled in the Art Students League:Author correspondence with Stephanie Cassidy, archivist, Art Students League; Facets of Ayn Rand , pp. 118–19.

Robert Brackman and Robert Beverly Hale:Author interview with Don Ventura, March 19, 2004.

popular among the students:McConnell, “Recollections of Ayn Rand I.”

women, particularly, admired his good looks: TPOAR , p. 282.

“I did not yet know about his drinking”: MYWAR , p. 162.

Rand had honored her lover:About becoming AR’s “intellectual heir,” NB said in 2004, “[Now] I don’t know what it means, but I thought I did then. I guess it meant ‘the anointed one to carry on the tradition,’ ‘the keeper of the flame’” (author interview with NB, May 5, 2004).

“The idea of the greatest literary

masterpiece”: MYWAR , p. 194.

didn’t occur to him until later: MYWAR , pp. 176–77.

limit his freedom:Author interview with NB, April 6, 2008.