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Without A Prayer Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System
Without A Prayer Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System Author:John W. Robbins In 1926 a young Russian emigre' made her way to Chicago to visit relatives. Fresh from the University of Petrograd, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum desperately wanted to escape the Communists who had captured her country, even if it meant abandoning her family in Russia. Taking a new name from a typewriter (Remington-Rand) and a Nordic novel, Ayn ... more »Rand soon made her way to Hollywood and established herself as a screenwriter and playwright. But she quickly turned to writing novels as the most effective vehicle for advancing her ideas.
Fifty years after publication of her major novel of ideas, Atlas Shrugged, and twenty-five years after her death, Ayn Rand remains a bestselling author. Her many books, both fisction and non-fiction, have been read by millions of people, and some of them take her ideas very seriously. Rand has been a major influence on the libertarian and conservative movements in America, and her books are now being distributed worldwide. At least two of Rand's novels The Fountainhead and We, the Living- have been made into major motion pictures, and Rand's plays have been performed both on and off Broadway for decades.
The standard by which Without a Prayer judges Rand is her own standard; logical precision and consistency. Without a Prayer does not condemn Rand for being "too logical," as some critics have done, for the author is convinced that it is impossible to be too logical just as it is impossible to be too virtuous or too healthy. Rather, Without a Prayer demonstrates that Rand was not nearly logical enough. Had she been more logical in her writing she would have advocated ideas opposed to those she actually advocated.« less