Ayn Rand: Writing a gospel of success
On International Women’s Day: Remembering Ayn Rand -a book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
With International Women’s Day on Saturday, 8 March 2025, it seems singularly appropriate to review a recently published book examining the life of controversial author and screenwriter Ayn Rand, who inspired three generations of economists in the United States and around the world. They became her dedicated disciples, acolytes of the American capitalism she revered and expounded and which she believed enabled the individual to create their own destiny, security, prosperity and success.
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum on 2 February 1905, the eldest daughter of a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Soviet Russia. Her father, Zelman-Wolf, was a pharmacist, and her mother, Khana Berkovna, was a dentist. Not long after the Bolsheviks seized power on 7 November 1917 and proclaimed a socialist regime, they institutionalised the concept of ‘the enemy of the people’, and established the Cheka, the secret police. Ayn’s philosophy and lifelong advocacy of capitalism was predicated on self-interest that contrasted with and grew out of her bitter experiences of the totalitarian state’s constraints and pressures on the individual. Soviet Russia’s population—in particular, the peasant farmers dispossessed, marginalised and sacrificed to Stalin’s collectivisation—was subjugated brutally and irrevocably, starving for the greater good of his tyrannical and dominant communist ideology.
On arrival in the United States, Alisa adopted the pseudonym Ayn Rand that preserved her initials and furthered her desire to succeed through assimilating to the broader culture. She brazenly waylaid Hollywood director Cecil de Mille, who was impressed with this ‘little Russian immigrant girl’. After a week observing his filming of The King of Kings, a biblical epic based on the Gospels, he gave her a job as an extra in the film. Only ten months after landing in America, De Mille employed her as a junior writer earning $25 per week and, as Popoff notes, ‘she was no longer an outsider in Hollywood. She secured a job in Hollywood RKO Radio Pictures studio, the humble launch pad for what would ultimately be her scintillating literary career.
Former Moscow journalist Alexandra Popoff, critically acclaimed author of Vassily Grossman and the Soviet Century, has written an authoritative, scholarly and informative biography of Rand that elucidates the complexities of her subject’s life and thought, cultural and religious background and education, as well as her aspirations to deliver moral messages that powered a meteoric career. She was propelled from obscurity as a wardrobe assistant and aspiring screenwriter in Hollywood, to a pinnacle of international prominence and renown. Her novels and non-fiction sold 36 million copies. Her books, in particular Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, influenced generations of Americans.
As Popoff notes in her preface, she discovered in Rand a deliberatively provocative writer, who compelled her readers to take sides, a strategy of engagement with the reader that Popoff herself perpetuates in her own writing of this biography. It is, of course, possible to read and enjoy this book as a straightforward account of a remarkably gifted, brilliant and undoubtedly controversial woman who defied the intellectual conventions of her time to soar to great heights. However, Popoff’s authorial clarity, expertise and knowledge in defining Rand’s ideological battleground, as well as the political, journalistic and social currents of the day that underpinned her battles, in turn, stimulates the reader to engage with this text in a profoundly analytical way. The reader is constantly nudged by both Rand and Popoff to get involved in the discourse and to take sides in a debate of good versus evil that was so fundamental to Western economics through the decades. Consequently, this book, compels the reader to reflect throughout on real and important issues that one either endorses or rejects or from which one might salvage some significant ideas. It is, however, impossible to remain indifferent to either the subject or Rand’s life work.
Rand was in her time a towering figure with broad influence in universities, government and among lay readers of every religious, ethnic and political persuasion. In this biography dense with factual information, Popoff does full justice to her subject by focusing on her formidable intellectual gifts and the impact of her major works, while also providing a satisfying portrait of a woman whose marriage failed and whose ruthlessness in pursuing a young suitor and admirers of her cerebral gifts had devastating consequences on the lives of those who trusted and admired her.
This interpretative biography is a recent and welcome addition to the Yale University series, in partnership with the Leon D Black Foundation, ‘dedicated to illuminating the range and depth of the Jewish experience’, encompassing studies of religion, philosophy, politics, culture, economics, arts and science. Recent biographies published by Yale University in this series include Hayim Nahman Bialik, Steven Spielberg: A life in Films, Yitzhak Rabin and Rabbi Akiva.
Ayn Rand: Writing a gospel of success
Alexandra Popoff
Yale University Press in partnership with the Leon D Black Foundation
New Haven and London
2024
