Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns

I came across this book after visiting Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA. I remembered that Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead had been modeled after William Randolph Hearst and wanted to learn more. I did a search on Google and found a passage in Jennifer Burns' book describing the process Ayn Rand went through in writing The Fountainhead. I was intrigued to learn more about Rand's writing process so I bought the book which is a biography of Rand.

I wasn't interested in the details of her affair with Nathaniel Branden or her influence on the libertarians, but the details of her writing process were very interesting to me.  For example:

• She plotted out her novels before she started writing and then filled in the details with chapters which sometimes were only a sentence or two in her outline.
• She struggled with the resolution of The Fountainhead around which she could build a plot. It was only after working for free at an architect's office for six months that she learned that public housing was one of the biggest challenges for an architect. This gave her the idea for the ending and then she quickly plotted the rest of the book from this.
• The plotting of Atlas Shrugged went quickly as did the writing except for Galt's speech. She struggled between writing it as part of the story rather than as a philosophical essay in its own right.
• In Petrograd after the revolution, her father went on strike and refused to work at any meaningful job that used his intelligence. This impressed young Ayn and was inspiration for the plot of Atlas Shrugged.
• The Fountainhead had to be written and edited on a very rushed timeline. She had already missed the deadlines for a previous publisher who had cancelled her contract and she didn't want that to happen again. For me, The Fountainhead is much less compelling than either Atlas Shrugged or We the Living. Perhaps it is because it was the only novel she had to rush to complete.
• When she had trouble writing, she came up with strategies to break out of the writer's block (which she called the squirms). One technique was to take a walk on the path outside her home, collect stones, and then organize them by color and size.
• The reviews for The Fountainhead were mostly positive because she was someone new and had something fresh to say. The reviews for Atlas Shrugged were mostly negative even though the philosophy was the same. However, I believe the reviewer crowd finally figured out that she held them in contempt for being second-handers and they got their revenge with their reviews. However, it didn't work and Atlas Shrugged quickly became a best-seller.

Besides learning interesting things about Rand's writing process and her early life, the rest of the book was not very useful. Jennifer Burns does not understand Rand's philosophy and so her criticisms make her seem partisan to the libertarian faction. In addition, she gets several details wrong which should be corrected in future editions and on the Kindle version:

• She says Dagny Taggart's hair is blonde but it is brown.
• She said that The Passion of Ayn Rand film was made by HBO but it was Showtime.

At the end, she does make a useful observation that many of the books produced by The Ayn Rand Institute after Rand's death contain misleading changes to Rand's private writings, in particular her Journals. It is useful to know that these sources have been bowdlerized and are not necessarily representative of Rand's actual thoughts at the time.