Biography of Rand is a gem of a book

AYN RAND, by Jeff Britting, Overlook Duckworth, 135 pages, $19.95.

Ayn Rand is most famous for her 1943 novel "The Fountainhead" ("Man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress"), which became a legendary movie starring Gary Cooper. But upon her death, she left a mountain of written material, including newspaper articles, five novels and six works of philosophy, as well as a great many unpublished writings, notes and drawings.

Jeff Britting, an archivist at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif., produced a 1997 documentary film on Rand's life ("Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life") and now has written a short but fascinating biography, simply titled "Ayn Rand," which is appropriately filled with wonderful photos and illustrations, most of them previously unpublished.

Any aspiring writer will be happy to see Rand's own list of the 12 notable publishers who rejected "The Fountainhead," a best seller after it was eventually published by Bobbs-Merrill. In a recent poll conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" was voted "the most influential novel upon American readers."

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, Rand moved with her family to the Ukraine and then to Yevpatoria in the Crimea in 1918. As a child she began writing scenarios for films. Soon she was fascinated by literature and determined to be a writer.

She graduated from Leningrad State University in 1924, then left for the United States the following year. All her life, she condemned the system of communism spawned by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In 1926, she met Cecil B. DeMille and became a movie extra on "The King of Kings." Afterward, DeMille hired her as a junior screenwriter. By 1931, she was an American citizen and heavily involved in writing plays, screenplays and novels. Her themes were almost always individuality, goal-orientation and heroism.

While writing "The Fountainhead," Rand worked on the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell Wilkie (the Republican opposing Franklin Roosevelt's bid for re-election). Wilkie lost, but the book and the 1949 movie established her anti-communist credentials in the world of philosophy, and she testified in 1947 before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities, where various actors, directors and writers were "outed" as communists or communist sympathizers.

In the 1950s, when she was most criticized for her ideas, Rand sought refuge in meetings in her home with several young conservative intellectuals, including Alan Greenspan, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. She called the group "the Collective" and used it as a forum for her increasingly controversial ideas.

This is a gem of a book, unusual for its brevity yet a very complete chronology and analysis of a most unusual character in recent American history.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com