Yeah, I want the juicy stuff! Send it all my way: the obsessions, the lies, the double-cross! Woo-hoo!
Ummmm… her style of prose is often long-winded and she tends to dwell on insignificant details to a fault. I guess thats kinda like dirt-- in a literary sense anyway.
She’s a writer people either adore or despise – I fall into the second category, so please be aware of my bias 
Her most infamous argument, in a nutshell, is that altruism – wanting to do the right thing, for the good of the world – is the root of all evil. She points to the evil acts committed by religious fanatics, Nazis, etc, as proof of this.
Somehow, she concludes that the opposite – “selfishness is good” – is also true. Obviously she missed things like corporate collaboration with dictators, etc. She also doesn’t think much of us environmentalists – she portrays us unstable, dangerous, and irrational.
Personally, I think the only people who subscribe to her beliefs are selfish human beings who don’t want to feel guilty for the suffering they inflict on other people. She’s very popular with those corporate types whose companies are guilty of less-than-ethical business practices.
They simply have to tell themselves that “selfishness is good” enough times, and they’ll start believing it.
The tale of Ayn Rand is a sordid one, full of drugs, guns, sex, lies, obsession and objectivism. We would like to caution younger and more impressionable readers before continuing with this story.
Ayn Rand was born in New Jersey to middle-class parents. Her mother, Nancy, was an out-of-work seamstress with a diet pill habit. Nancy frequently told Ayn and her nine brothers and sisters that if they did poorly in school they would be clubbed to death by wood trolls. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this, Ayn proudly won spelling bees every year of grade school. Ayn’s father, Charlie, was a traveling shoe salesman who often greeted the kids with “Happy Birthday… you.”
The family lived in a duplex and had a maid, Luisa Jones-Schnectady, who cleaned their apartment twice a week. As a child, Ayn distinctly remembers Luisa reaching her arm all the way down the drainpipe in the sink to clean out a clog that had resulted from her brother’s misguided attempts to make Jell-O in the sink. On one of these occasions, Luisa yanked her arm out of the sink and shouted for the children to call the hospital. She had been bitten by a rabid badger that had crawled its way into the New Jersey water supply, and inexplicably wedged itself in their kitchen sink’s drainpipe. Although after a few weeks in the hospital, Luisa fully recovered, the incident had a marked effect on Ayn, who spent several months afterward huddled on her bunk bed, clutching a nail file and a nude Barbie doll and muttering “No one ever suspects the nun.” She finally came around when her brother Alex poured boiling water down the drainpipe to prove to her that there was nothing down there.
Ayn continued her good grades well into high school, but some people say that high school is when her sociopathic tendencies began to reveal themselves. She was crushed when her first boyfriend, a young heir from a wealthy family, broke up with her to ask a “less bookish” girl, Deirdre Wampshuttle, to the junior prom. This event never sat well with Ayn, who retreated into a strict regimen of calculus, cold showers and blueberry pancakes. On the night of the prom, Deirdre Wampshuttle’s car struck a tree at a high speed, killing her instantly. Although the coroner officially ruled Deirdre’s death an accident, and Ayn insisted that she was helping her mother can tomatoes that night, several girls at school became convinced that Ayn was somehow involved in Deirdre’s death. She subsequently became an outcast in high school, and was teased about the incident until she graduated.
Ayn’s father Charlie had sold enough shoes to send her to a finishing school in Brooklyn. However, financial constraints nearly forced her to drop out and work full-time to support her siblings. Ayn soon tired of classes in etiquette and proper literature and turned her cunning intelligence towards manipulation and blackmail. To pay for her tuition, Ayn recruited some interested girls from the remedial classes and became the finishing school’s first and youngest madam. She took up to fifty percent of anything her friends earned through high-class prostitution and used it to finance her tuition. While most girls were learning how to behave respectably and act in all manners befitting young ladies, Ayn realized that a facade of respectability and class would be indispensible in hiding her ruthlessness.
Despite allegations of hit-and-run manslaughter and debutante prostitution, not even Ayn was prepared for the scandal that would rock New York soci -
…oh. You mean the author Ayn Rand.
Daowajan, you’re a nut in the most complimentary way possible.
For a slightly more serious answer to the OP, check out Nathaniel Branden’s “unauthorized” biography. Although it is certainly chock full of self-justifying malarky, it is certainly worth reading.
If you wanna read whether Ms. Rand was a good rag between the sheets, check this book out.
Maybe aynrandlover will post something in this thread, eh?
Daowajan, “No one ever suspects the nun”? That was bizarre enough to make me laugh out loud. Now people are wondering what I’m doing in here…
I can do this for hours. I had plans for cocaine parties, murders on cruise ships, and maybe the assassination of Trotsky, but I figured it was getting pretty long.
Just give me an excuse. School’s out and ain’t no one hiring. 
I voluntarily read The Fountainhead. I also (almost) threw it out a bus window before I finished it. Unfortunately, it’s the only Rand book I’ve ever read. I think Hamish did an excellent summary, and I agree with it.
While read the aforementioned book, I kept wondering- if sympathy is wrong, and we should only respect strength, do we abandon or strangle our children? Or other dependents? Her philosophy seems weak, at best.
True. I always wondered what would have happened to Miss Rand if her parents had embraced absolute selfishness. One day they might have decided that raising a child was more tiring and costly than could be justified by the emotional benefits received, and left her in a dumpster somewhere.
A mobile ashtray with delusions of grandure, who wrote gibberish and spewed venom. The L. Ron Hubbard of pop philosophy.
Awww, c’mon, isn’t anyone gonna give me the jiucy gossip on her rivate life? 
D’you seriously want me to have to go and read about her? Eeew. I feel dirty enough having just read the one book.
Also, Hamish, can you imagine what it would be like to be raised by Randite/Objectivist parents? That would screw you up eternally. If they didn’t decide to kill you for inconveniencing them. Hey, there’s an Objectivist newspaper at U of Toronto- I should pick up a copy and see what they say about child rearing.
Rape as an act of love??!!
Sorry for hijacking. I just hate Rand’s philosophy. Apologies, smiling bandit.
Believe it or not, I was in school with a girl who was actually named after Ayn Rand. I didn’t know her family, but the girl seemed relatively sane. She was a fierce overachiever, though.
Damn IT! Somebody link to Jarbabyjs Ann Rants!
:mad:
(Not surprising, but so very, very sad)
Feh, I set up this elaborate joke and nobody seems to have noticed it. The smiley in my last post is a link.
For some reason, a good deal of young (between 18 and 21 year old) men I have known have gone through an Ayn Rand phase. Part of me thinks it’s a “get out of morals” free card, and a way of deflecting disappointment/anxiety/etc.
As for the juicy Ayn Rand gossip… she was addicted to diet pills, had a very long affair with one of her young male disciples (the aforementioned Nathaniel Branden), shunned anyone that did not believe she was 100% right ALL THE TIME, and generally just sounds like she was a self-centered nasty human being with a seriously overinflated sense of self-importance.
(when I first met my boyfriend, he was very into Ayn Rand. Thankfully, that’s run its course. If it didn’t, I don’t know what would have happened.)
This link leads you to a lot of “What the hell was wrong with Ayn Rand” pages (as well as some criticisms of objectivism).