The Early Ayn Rand

Part III covers the late 1930s and represents Ayn Rand's first mature work. It includes an intriguing stage play, the philosophical murder mystery Think Twice; and two sets of excerpts from The Fountainhead manuscript that were cut before publication. One of these tells the story of Roark's first love affair, before he met Dominique.

An early short story has been omitted from this collection, along with several screenplays (adapting other authors' stories) from her days in Hollywood, some scenarios for the silent screen, and a version of We the Living written for the stage. Aside from these items, there is no more of Ayn Rand's fiction that remains unpublished. (There are no excerpts from the Atlas Shrugged manuscript long enough to warrant publication.)

By the nature of this anthology, most of the material is imperfect, unedited and/or undeveloped Ayn Rand. But it is still Ayn Rand — and that is the second reason for publishing it. Despite all the flaws, despite everything she has still to learn, her vision of man and of life, and even some of her power to convey that vision in words, are there at the beginning. They are real, they are able to break through, to be felt, to haunt us. For those who admire her work, as I do, this is reason enough to grasp at these early pieces.

I first met Ayn Rand in 1951 at her home in California. She was writing Atlas Shrugged at the time; I was a pre-medical student who loved The Fountainhead and was brimming over with philosophical questions to ask her about it. That meeting changed my life.

Ayn Rand was unlike anyone I had ever imagined. Her mind was utterly firsthanded. On intellectual issues, she said what no one else said or perhaps had ever even thought, but she said these things so logically — so simply, factually, persuasively — that they seemed to be self-evident. And she was passionate about ideas; she radiated the kind of intensity that one could imagine changing the course of history. Her brilliantly perceptive eyes looked straight at you and missed nothing; neither did her methodical, painstaking, virtually scientific replies to my questions miss anything. She convinced me that night that philosophy is a science, with objective, provable answers to its questions; it is the science that moves the world, she argued, whether men acknowledge the fact or not. It did not take me long to give up medicine and decide on philosophy as a career.

As the years passed, I came to work closely with Miss Rand, first as an informal student of hers, then as a writer and lecturer on her ideas. The two of us regularly talked ideas, not infrequently for twelve hours (or more) at a stretch. I learned more about philosophy listening to her than I did from ten years in graduate school getting a Ph.D. in the subject.

Not long after I met Miss Rand, she let me read the two plays in the present collection, Ideal and Think Twice; she was pleased with both and hoped to see them produced one day. (This, I think, is why she never tried to have them published.) I also came to read the short story "Good Copy" and to hear Miss Rand's analysis of it; she regarded this piece as a worthy, though flawed, attempt by a beginning writer. Of the rest of this collection, I read nothing at all during Miss Rand's lifetime (though I heard from her in passing about a few items, which she regarded as ancient history). I was astonished, after her death, to find so much fiction that was new to me in her "trunk."

Out of this new material, I have three personal favorites: "Vesta Dunning," for the quality of the writing; "Kira's Viking," for its fairy-tale romanticism; and "The Husband I Bought," because it is a rare window on Ayn Rand's soul at the beginning, before she knew much about philosophy, art, or English — a window that reveals eloquently her own intense dedication to values. Along with the material I already knew, these pieces are what convinced me, as her literary executor, to publish the total.

To those unfamiliar with Ayn Rand, however, I want to say that this book is not the place to begin. Read her novels first. If their ideas interest you, you might then turn to her nonfiction works, such as The Virtue of Selfishness (on ethics), or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (politics), or The Romantic Manifesto (aesthetics). Then, if you wish, pick up the present collection.