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Journals of Ayn Rand

ayn rand leonard peikoff david harriman

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Rarely has a writer and thinker of the stature of Ayn Rand afforded us access to her most intimate thoughts and feelings. From Journals of Ayn Rand, we gain an invaluable new understanding and appreciation of the woman, the artist, and the philosopher, and of the enduring legacy she has left us.Rand comes vibrantly to life as an untried screenwriter in Hollywood, creating stories that reflect her youthful vision of the world. We see her painful memories of communist Russia and her struggles to convey them in We the Living. Most fascinating is the intricate, step-by-step process through which she created the plots and characters of her two masterworks, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the years of painstaking research that imbued the novels with their powerful authenticity. Complete with reflections on her legendary screenplay concerning the making of the atomic bomb and tantalizing descriptions of projects cut short by her death, Journals of Ayn Rand illuminates the mind and heart of an extraordinary woman as no biography or memoir ever could. On these vivid pages, Ayn Rand lives.

752 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1997

This edition

Format
752 pages, Paperback
Published
August 1, 1999 by NAL
ISBN
9780452278875
ASIN
0452278872
Language
English

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About the author

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ayn rand

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Polemical novels, such as The Fountainhead (1943), of primarily known Russian-American writer Ayn Rand, originally Alisa Rosenbaum, espouse the doctrines of objectivism and political libertarianism.

Fiction of this better author and philosopher developed a system that she named. Educated, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early initially duds and two Broadway plays, Rand achieved fame. In 1957, she published Atlas Shrugged, her best-selling work.

Rand advocated reason and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism as opposed to altruism. She condemned the immoral initiation of force and supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system, based on recognizing individual rights, including private property. Often associated with the modern movement in the United States, Rand opposed and viewed anarchism. In art, she promoted romantic realism. She sharply criticized most philosophers and their traditions with few exceptions.

Books of Rand sold more than 37 million copies. From literary critics, her fiction received mixed reviews with more negative reviews for her later work. Afterward, she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, published her own periodicals, and released several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

After her death, her ideas interested academics, but philosophers generally ignored or rejected her and argued that her approach and work lack methodological rigor. She influenced some right conservatives. The movement circulates her ideas to the public and in academic settings.

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Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 19 votes)
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19 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
ToumaDragons
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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p 419
The creator's greatest tie to the world is the fact that he will not (ital) surrender the world to the parasites. He realizes that it is his proper function to shape the world to his wishes. And he struggles to do it no matter what obstacles the parasites put in his way. But by tolerating them or compromising by accepting their terms, he succeeds only in creating their (ital) world -- or in keeping it going.

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citycat
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Como todo el trabajo de Rand este libro no tiene desperdicio. Es fantástico poder ver cómo estructuraba su escritura, cómo pensaba, como organizaba sus ideas. Es asombrosa su lucidez, su claridad mental. Un libro indispensable para los que quieran saber más de Rand, así como para quienes aman la literatura y están interesados en los procesos creativos.
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NillyPC
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Tremendous insights! More raw and unvarnished thinking from Ayn Rand. Her journal entries present a personality that is consistent with her published work, but it's so interesting to see her raw and candid thoughts. I especially appreciate her notes on characters and ideas that she goes on to develop in her fiction (notably Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
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Nortorn
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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A book which has consumed a year of my life. I feel like I have internalized the AR philosophy. Impressed by her original thinking , conviction and the detailed world and philosophy she set up for her every book. Truly a fountainhead.
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HisokaFanFromBG
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Very interesting...picked this up for an essay I had to write on Anthem and ended up loving it and reading most of the essays. Shows lots of Rand's ideas about her philosophy of objectivism and such. Overall a nice book for any Rand fan.
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Raijin_-_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Lot of amazing passages and nice clarity of thought for a woman who did not learn English no earlier than her early tees.

Perhaps one of the most wickedly brilliant lines was when she observed how, while capitalism encourages people to bring forth their best, socialism is a disease that encourages people to appear weak and needy.

Also offered a glimpse into the thought processes that went into her books. (Including some characters being eliminated as she ultimately felt some redundant.) Definitely one of those books that offers some daily insight if you were to only read a couple pages a day.
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Ranko7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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This book revealed a few things, but not much more than a thin outline of AR's plans for a final novel, *To Lorne Dieterling* and a few extra characters for *Atlas Shrugged.* There were notes on epistemology, and another book (between *Fountainhead* and *AS*) which would have been nonfiction. Doubtless she used some of this for later non-fiction. It did show how her mind worked to plan her novels, and in a way, shows how limited was her focus. She apparently had no notes for *Anthem* or the editor chose not to include them.
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soYaaqo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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It may have taken me more than 3 years to get through, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Journals of Ayn Rand. It was fascinating to see her thought develop over decades—and to trace all the effort she put into researching and writing her books.
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