Yesterday, I posted a lecture by David Harvey on Karl Marx Das Kapital. I did this because the majority of people have not even read Marx’s main work and do not really get what he is talking about. On the other hand, Ayn Rand has been read by many Americans and her objectivist philosophy is a favorite of many, esp. in business and politics. So it is the opposite problem: many AMericans are well read in Rand but hold her notions alongside many mutually exclusive ideas. I cannot say how many “Randians” I have met in my life who also claim to be “Christians,” for instance.

To understand how Alissa Rosenbaum created Ayn Rand, we need to trace her itinerary not to pre-revolutionary Russia, which is the mistaken conceit of these biographies, but to her destination upon leaving Soviet Russia in 1926: Hollywood. For where else but in the dream factory could Rand have learned how to make dreams—about America, about capitalism and about herself?

Even before she was in Hollywood, Rand was of Hollywood. In 1925 alone, she saw 117 movies. It was in movies, Burns says, that Rand “glimpsed America”—and, we might add, developed her enduring sense of narrative form. Once there, she became the subject of her very own Hollywood story. She was discovered by Cecil B. DeMille, who saw her mooning about his studio looking for work. Intrigued by her intense gaze, he gave her a ride in his car and a job as an extra, which she quickly turned into a screenwriting gig. Within a few years her scripts were attracting attention from major players, prompting one newspaper to run a story with the headline Russian Girl Finds End of Rainbow in Hollywood.

via Garbage and Gravitas | The Nation.