Charles Murray on Ayn Rand

Via Marginal Revolution
Charles Murray, ostensibly reviewing two new biographies of Ayn Rand:

In 1991, the book-of-the-month club conducted a survey asking people what book had most influenced their lives. The Bible ranked number one and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was number two. In 1998, the Modern Library released two lists of the top 100 books of the 20th century. One was compiled from the votes of the Modern Library's Board, consisting of luminaries such as Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, Edmund Morris, and Salman Rushdie. The two top-ranked books on the Board's list were Ulysses and The Great Gatsby. The other list was based on more than 200,000 votes cast online by anyone who wanted to vote. The top two on that list were Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943). The two novels have had six-figure annual sales for decades, running at a combined 300,000 copies annually during the past ten years. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged alone sold a record 500,000 copies and Rand's four novels combined (the lesser two are We the Living [1936] and Anthem [1938]) sold more than 1,000,000 copies.

And yet for 27 years after her death in 1982, we haven't had a single scholarly biography of Ayn Rand. Who was this woman? How did she come to write such phenomenally influential novels? What are we to make of her legacy? These are the questions that finally have been asked and answered splendidly, with somewhat different emphases, in two new biographies published within weeks of each other: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller, a former executive editor at Condé Nast Publications.

Murray doesn't exactly review the books. He is far more interested in reviewing Rand and her work. Murray is a guy whose ideas and work are pretty antithetical to mine, and I've read other stuff by him that's utter crap (e.g., his commentary on David Frum's expulsion from the conservative temple), but this is a very nice article from a guy who has drunk the kool aid but can still see Rand clearly. She was, he says, an utter failure in living up to her own ideals, but he remains under the spell of the fantasy worlds she created in her two big novels. He almost persuades me to read Atlas Shrugged.