Two Ayn Rand Biographies Not Worth Your Time

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Aaron Smith interviews Elan Journo to discuss his critical evaluation of two popular but deeply flawed biographies of Ayn Rand: Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

Among the topics covered:

• The standards of objectivity that the biographies fail to meet;
• The authors’ disregard for how Rand thought of herself and her work;
• Examples of the books’ lack of objectivity;
• How the authors mishandled the biographies’ sources;
• Why ignoring Rand’s philosophy makes the books less interesting and intelligible.

Recommended in this podcast are Journo’s articles “‘Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right’ Is Worse than Incompetent” and “Postscript: ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ Is an Exploitative, Tabloid Biography,” and Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri’s book A Companion to Ayn Rand.

The podcast was posted on October 23, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.