100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand

[intellectualammo]

100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand by Scott McConnell (2010)

This book is a collection of 100 interviews from people that have known Ayn Rand, as an acquaintance, as an employee of hers, family member… All the interviews were done by Scott McConnell (except for two, they were done by translators, but were his questions they asked). The date/year of the interview is given and a brief description of them and their relation to Ayn Rand in whatever way that they were. Let me give you a sampling of the 100 people interviewed:

Eleanora “Nora” Drobysheva (Ayn Rand’s youngest sister)

Patricia Neal (actress who played Dominique in the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead)

Mickey Spillane (one of Ayn Rand’s favorite writers, who was also a friend of hers)

Mike Wallace (the TV journalist who’d interviewed Rand several times)

Herman Ivey (instructor at West Point who arranged it so Rand could lecture there, her lecture Philosophy: Who Needs It)

Eugene Winick (one of Rand’s lawyers)

Cynthia Peikoff (one of Rand’s secretaries)

Malcolm Fraser (prime minister of Australia who met Rand at the White House)

Michael Jaffe (Hollywood producer, who’d worked with his father and Rand on developing the Atlas Shrugged miniseries)

Frances Smith (executive director, president and chairman of the board of the Ford Hall Forum where Rand almost yearly from 1961 to 1981)

Harry Binswanger

McConnell says that this oral history program “began in April 1996 as a project of the Ayn Rand Archives, a department of the Ayn Rand Institute. The purpose of the program was to gather and preserve knowledge about Ayn Rand’s life. It supplements the Archives’ collections of Ayn Rand’s personal papers and related materials in all media”

I enjoyed reading the interviews which filled up over 600 pages in this work, it’s a wonderful opportunity to read accounts of what all the people had to say in regards to Ayn Rand. Some of them, after the interview, died within a few years after it.