Famous for her credo of individualism and unbridled capitalism, novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand never talked about her life as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, an awkward and offbeat Russian Jewish girl of startling intelligence. Yet Heller believes that Rand's adamant self-regard and vehement protest against any form of collectivism or social conscience are rooted in her family's suffering in early-twentieth-century Russia, where Jews were violently persecuted and personal freedom was abolished. Heller is the first to fully investigate and vigorously chronicle Rand's willful life and phenomenal and controversial achievements, from her sense of destiny (by age 11 she had already written four novels) to her arrival in America at age 21 in 1926, her work in Hollywood, and her reign in New York as a cult figurehead. Heller also offers arresting analysis of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand's critically condemned yet perpetually popular and enormously influential novels of erotic melodrama and self-aggrandizing ideology. But the heart of the book is the wrenching story of Rand's marriage to long-suffering Frank O'Connor and her affair with the much younger man who packaged and peddled her beliefs as Objectivism. The champion of individuality who insisted on obedience and conformity from her followers (including Alan Greenspan), Rand emerges from Heller's superbly vivid, enlightening, and affecting biography in all her paradoxical power. 
Booklist, starred review

In the calamitous aftermath of the latter years of the Age of Greenspan, what could be more welcome-and timely-than Anne C. Heller's stunning biography of Ayn Rand. Using a plethora of newly unearthed research and fresh insight, Heller's graceful and highly readable narrative once again brings Rand to life and reminds us all why she remains one of the best-selling and highly influential authors of all time. 
William D. Cohan, bestselling author of House of Cards

Anne C. Heller has written a riveting, massively researched biography of the self styled 'radical for capitalism' Ayn Rand. Heller documents how Rand's novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged became virtual bibles for the followers of Objectivism, Rand's controversial philosophy, and she vividly dramatizes the passionate battles that ensued within Rand's cult. This is a fascinating study of a fascinating and implacable woman; it's a major work. Heller has done an extraordinary job. 
Patricia Bosworth, author of Diane Arbus: A Biography 

"Anne C. Heller has given us a great gift: an engaging, important biography of Ayn Rand, a quietly ubiquitous yet little-understood architect of the way we live now."
Jon Meacham, author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

Starting now, anyone curious about the extraordinary self-created woman who became the complex, contradictory, and utterly fascinating Ayn Rand will have to begin with Anne C. Heller's brilliant biography. Reading this book will be the only way to comprehend the totality of the woman whose swashbuckling life was an epic that could rival any screen play or novel she ever wrote, any political theory or philosophy she ever espoused or created. 
Deirdre Bair, author of Samuel Beckett: A Biography, winner of the National Book Award

"An intriguing look at an important woman. This extensively researched biography reveals Rand's fierce intelligence and forceful will to seduce and influence some of the 20th century's leading decision makers."
Janet Wallach, author of Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell

"A thoroughly absorbing account of the passion, ferocity, ambition, and humanity."