Reidy

This brings up a related question: how does the novel's historical setting affect first-time readers today? It was a bit of a period piece in 1957 (execs no longer took cross-country business trips by train; network radio was no longer the primary news and entertainment medium) and a bit more when I first read it. For most newcomers today it's a book of their great-grandparents' era. Does this make it harder or easier (or neither) to get into?

Side point: Rand got one detail wrong about The Best Years of our Lives. On p. 367-368 of Journals she says that the movie shows a rich businessman bouncing a war hero from a flight, when in fact the opening scene establishes that the businessman has a reservation while the vet is on standby. Most Americans of the era would have recognized that this is what "space available" means.
She asks "What is the point of this episode - if not the implication that the vicious, unpatriotic rich are grossly indifferent to war heroes?" The point might be that the military is ungrateful to its vets for not buying them reserved seats, but more likely it's simply a way of heightening the character's tension, and the audience's, about seeing him safely home.

Angi has posted digital realizations of some of FLlW's unbuilt houses, including one for Rand and her husband. Unfortunately it's only still pictures, not a 3-D walkthrough. (For a great example of the latter, see the Imperial Hotel.)
I'd hate to have to open and close all those louvered windows each day.

Similar history here. I heard the story as gossip and found it too weird to believe, so I didn't until BB's book came out years later.
The two published In Reply to Ayn Rand a and sent it to the Objectivist subscriber list. He said that what finally, irrevocably broke them up was his telling her that the age difference was "an insurmountable barrier to a romantic relationship". We took it to mean that she wanted to start it, not revive it.
The text used to be at his website and perhaps in one of his books.

Similar history here. I heard the story as gossip and found it too weird to believe, so I didn't until BB's book came out years later.
The two published In Reply to Ayn Rand a and sent it to the Objectivist subscriber list. He said that what finally, irrevocably broke them up was his telling her that the age difference was "an insurmountable barrier to a romantic relationship". We took it to mean that she wanted to start it, not revive it.
The text used to be at his website and perhaps in one of his books.

Some possible examples of gay-turned-straight are the movie Enigma and Noel Coward's play Present Laughter. They weren't remakes, but they took real-life gay people and turned them straight, Alan Turing in the first case and Coward himself in the second.
People have been speculating for decades that George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf are both men, but the author insisted otherwise.

I believe the quote comes from her article "The Money-Making Personality" that ran in Cosmopolitan in the early 60s.
 
PS: https://www.amazon.com/COSMOPOLITAN-magazine-MONEY-MAKING-PERSONALITY-Cosmopolitan/dp/B000NE6D22

Our two favorite people are becoming a play.

Empirical psychology is not exactly a part of philosophy, but the Objectivist writings make several assertions in this field without providing more than intuitive or anecdotal evidence:
Personality predicts sexual attraction.
Sexual attraction predicts personality.
Artistic taste predicts personality.
Personality predicts artistic taste.
Childhood literary exposure predicts adult character.
Philosophical training and belief predict intellectual efficacy.
This is not to say that one couldn't test these claims, only that I haven't seen such tests.

Here's a companion piece: https://spectator.org/capitol-riot-fuhgeddaboudism/

Several of the California ballot propositions, not just 22, turned out well - racial quotas, tax increases and new dialysis regulations among them: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/good-news-for-conservatives-from-california/. Oregon voted for a big drug decriminalization.

Wednesday's Tracinski Letter linked to an article in the New York Review, which led me in turn to a Wikipedia article about the Solovki prison, the first Soviet death camp, originally a monastery and close to the Finnish border, facilitating escape. Rand's Red Pawn, a movie treatment that was her first literary sale, is set in just such a place. Solovki was first known in the west in 1934. I hadn't known how close to the facts Rand's setting was.

Roark's hair may be, after Samson's and Rapunzel's, the most famous in literature, and it's not blond.

The Objectivist Ethics had a limited print edition, as an NBI pamphlet, at least as early as 1962. In the background here you see a shelf of such pamphlets, which sold for $.25 - $.50.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/about-ayn-rand/faq.html

http://aynrandlexicon.com/about-ayn-rand/faq.html

Rand's recommendation of Hugo paid off handsomely. I struck out  on Dostoyevsky and Conrad. The Secret Agent has some amusingly contemporary allusions, but otherwise both authors escaped me.

No, because the money to support these schools was taken from you and others by force. This is not your doing. See Rand's The Question of Scholarships.

In Oak Park IL on Thursday the 11th, a rare chance to hear the music that inspired We the Living in the building that inspired Roark's Stoddard Temple:
http://www.utrf.org/operetta-in-exile/
 

In Oak Park IL on Thursday the 11th, a rare chance to hear the music that inspired We the Living in the building that inspired Roark's Stoddard Temple:
http://www.utrf.org/operetta-in-exile/
 

This article, about the anti-revolutionary civil war in the Vendée region of France, might interest a Randian audience, because it was the historical background of Hugo's Ninety-Three, for which she wrote an introduction.

The argument here (identity precludes change) first showed up in Parmenides ca 500 BC. From the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology:
On the former path [i.e. of reason] we convince ourselves that the existent neither has come into being, nor is perishable, and is entirely of one sort, without change and limit, neither past nor future, entirely included in the present. For it is as impossible that it can become and grow out of the existent, as that it could do so out of the non-existent; since the latter, non-existence, is absolutely inconceivable, and the former cannot precede itself; and every coming into existence presupposes a non-existence.
His writings give us the first example of an explicit premise-and-conclusion argument. Much of Aristotle's metaphysics amounts to an explanation of what's wrong with that argument.

The argument here (identity precludes change) first showed up in Parmenides ca 500 BC. From the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology:
On the former path [i.e. of reason] we convince ourselves that the existent neither has come into being, nor is perishable, and is entirely of one sort, without change and limit, neither past nor future, entirely included in the present. For it is as impossible that it can become and grow out of the existent, as that it could do so out of the non-existent; since the latter, non-existence, is absolutely inconceivable, and the former cannot precede itself; and every coming into existence presupposes a non-existence.
His writings give us the first example of an explicit premise-and-conclusion argument. Much of Aristotle's metaphysics amounts to an explanation of what's wrong with that argument.

Regardless of who said it, and whether or not it’s true, the quote states a matter of profoundest conviction for Rand, and I think it’s a key to the enduring hold she has over her readers.
When we meet a character in one of her novels, we get a physical description as we do in just about any novel. We come across Roark immediately in The Fountainhead and James Taggart and Dagny Taggart very early on in Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s descriptions are largely in terms of acquired, character-revealing traits such as facial expression, carriage, posture or eye focus. The impersonal narrator makes these matters of fact like hair color or eye color. On a few occasions we get this indirectly, through the words or thoughts of a character recollecting a first sight (Rearden’s first sight of Dagny Taggart, Galt’s first sight of Rearden). What these descriptions and the many others like them have in common is that they are never wrong. Rand’s characters turn out to be just what they first seemed to be. Sheryl’s first impression of James Taggart doesn’t fit this pattern, and she misjudges him disastrously, but: (a) she sizes him up on the strength of his name, not of his visible air; (b) we first saw him a couple of pages into the book, and he has amply lived up to the expectations that his appearance gave him.
In her theory of art Rand spoke of eliminating the inessential: in life, one ignores the unimportant; in art, one omits it. False visual clues are among those forgettable contingencies that have no place in her art. In the Randian universe, our first impressions are correct. People don’t let us down in this respect.
This habit spilled over into her personal life. In her obituary for Marilyn Monroe, she says Monroe had “the radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked”. Readers have quoted this remark many times over the years, more times, I venture, than Rand expected. Yet I’ve never seen anyone ask why it can’t be faked. Monroe was an actress. Faking what she didn’t feel was her job. Elsewhere in the same column Rand says she “brilliantly talented” at it, but here she says Monroe couldn’t act. She wanted MM to be the person she saw up on the screen, and convinced herself that she was.
Rand herself and her biographers have told various stories of how often this acquaintance or that public figure “disappointed” her. She wanted people to live up to her expectations, and their failures to do so were a personal hurt. We’ve all known this feeling, and we’ve all been glad to meet somebody finally who is what we hoped, but it doesn’t loom as large for most of us.
Barbara Branden tells a story of Rand’s girlhood once in her 1962 biography and again in 1986. Young Alisa admired a schoolmate and wanted to get to know her. She asked, point-blank, what is the most important thing in the world to you? She replied, My mother, and Rand walked away in disappointment. That was the end of that.  In her earlier telling, BB makes this the other girl’s fault for not being was Alisa wanted her to be. In the later version, she says it’s typical of Rand’s failure to consider other people’s context before judging them. This failure on her part, and her idealism, may be closer than we realized.

Regardless of who said it, and whether or not it’s true, the quote states a matter of profoundest conviction for Rand, and I think it’s a key to the enduring hold she has over her readers.
When we meet a character in one of her novels, we get a physical description as we do in just about any novel. We come across Roark immediately in The Fountainhead and James Taggart and Dagny Taggart very early on in Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s descriptions are largely in terms of acquired, character-revealing traits such as facial expression, carriage, posture or eye focus. The impersonal narrator makes these matters of fact like hair color or eye color. On a few occasions we get this indirectly, through the words or thoughts of a character recollecting a first sight (Rearden’s first sight of Dagny Taggart, Galt’s first sight of Rearden). What these descriptions and the many others like them have in common is that they are never wrong. Rand’s characters turn out to be just what they first seemed to be. Sheryl’s first impression of James Taggart doesn’t fit this pattern, and she misjudges him disastrously, but: (a) she sizes him up on the strength of his name, not of his visible air; (b) we first saw him a couple of pages into the book, and he has amply lived up to the expectations that his appearance gave him.
In her theory of art Rand spoke of eliminating the inessential: in life, one ignores the unimportant; in art, one omits it. False visual clues are among those forgettable contingencies that have no place in her art. In the Randian universe, our first impressions are correct. People don’t let us down in this respect.
This habit spilled over into her personal life. In her obituary for Marilyn Monroe, she says Monroe had “the radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked”. Readers have quoted this remark many times over the years, more times, I venture, than Rand expected. Yet I’ve never seen anyone ask why it can’t be faked. Monroe was an actress. Faking what she didn’t feel was her job. Elsewhere in the same column Rand says she “brilliantly talented” at it, but here she says Monroe couldn’t act. She wanted MM to be the person she saw up on the screen, and convinced herself that she was.
Rand herself and her biographers have told various stories of how often this acquaintance or that public figure “disappointed” her. She wanted people to live up to her expectations, and their failures to do so were a personal hurt. We’ve all known this feeling, and we’ve all been glad to meet somebody finally who is what we hoped, but it doesn’t loom as large for most of us.
Barbara Branden tells a story of Rand’s girlhood once in her 1962 biography and again in 1986. Young Alisa admired a schoolmate and wanted to get to know her. She asked, point-blank, what is the most important thing in the world to you? She replied, My mother, and Rand walked away in disappointment. That was the end of that.  In her earlier telling, BB makes this the other girl’s fault for not being was Alisa wanted her to be. In the later version, she says it’s typical of Rand’s failure to consider other people’s context before judging them. This failure on her part, and her idealism, may be closer than we realized.