An Excerpt from “Introduction to ‘Calumet K’”: From Ayn Rand’s Bound Periodicals—Now in Paperback

Between 1962 and 1976, Ayn Rand published a series of periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter. Though many of the articles she published there were anthologized, some have only been available in bound periodicals long available for purchase from the Ayn Rand Institute. These periodicals are for the first time available in paperback at a significant discount from the original hardback versions.

The bound periodicals are invaluable as a means of understanding the historical context in which Rand wrote her nonfiction. Here we see her view of the American cultural-political scene unfolding in reaction to major milestones of the twentieth century: the Kennedy–Johnson administrations, the Vietnam War, the campus student rebellion, and the stagnation of the 1970s. Readers can see a high-level survey of the rich array of content in this earlier article in New Ideal. Rand not only comments on politics but publishes theoretical articles on epistemology and esthetics, along with reviews of the art and literature of her day.

New Ideal is pleased to feature short excerpts from those bound periodicals. Each is from an article never anthologized, exclusively available in the bound periodicals, and now available for purchase from Amazon.

Here we republish a short excerpt from an essay in her second periodical, The Objectivist: “Introduction to Calumet ‘K’” from October 1967. Henry Kitchell Webster and Samuel Merwin originally published their short novel Calumet “K” in 1901. NBI Press published a special edition of the book featuring Rand’s introduction in 1967. For a short excerpt from the novel itself, see this commentary, published earlier in New Ideal.

Calumet “K” is my favorite novel.

It is not a work of great literature – it is a work of light fiction, written by two collaborators, that appeared originally, in the year 1901, in a popular magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Its style is straightforward and competent, but undistinguished. It lacks the most important ingredient of good fiction, a plot structure. But it has one element that I have never found in any other novel: the portrait of an efficacious man.

The formal hero of this novel is a grain elevator, called “Calumet ‘K’,” and the novel tells the story of its construction, nothing more. But if you find yourself held in suspense, reading intently, hoping that the structure will be built on time, if you find that two simple, descriptive paragraphs (in the chapter before last) are a gloriously triumphant experience that makes you want to cheer aloud – it will be, like the grain elevator itself, the achievement of Charlie Bannon.

Bannon is the young superintendent in charge of building Calumet “K.” He is described as follows: “He was worn thin as an old knife-blade, he was just at the end of a piece of work that would have entitled any other man to a vacation; but MacBride made no apologies when he assigned him the new task . . .” He is sent to the job because no one else is able to do it: it is virtually impossible to complete the elevator by a certain crucial date. The construction is the story of Bannon’s quietly fierce struggle against powerful interests determined to sabotage the work and stop him. Behind the scenes, the fate of countless lives and enormous fortunes rests, not on Bannon’s shoulders, but on his brain.

The essence of the story is Bannon’s ingenuity in solving unexpected problems and smashing through sudden obstacles, his self-confident resourcefulness, his inexhaustible energy, his dedication. He is a man who takes nothing for granted, who thinks long-range, who assumes responsibility as a matter of course, as a way of life, knowing that there is no such thing as “luck” and if things are to be done, he has to do them.

His dominant characteristic is a total commitment to the absolutism of reality. Even though such philosophical abstractions are outside his knowledge and his story, his basic premise is the primacy of existence, not of consciousness – i.e., a mind, focus and passionate concern directed outward (with its inner concomitant: an unbreached self-esteem). This is why his story and his problems matter to me, as no lesser human problems can. . . .

To read the rest, order your copy of The Objectivist from Amazon today.