We the Living Material Released

More of Ayn Rand’s archival material is now available online, including more than 120 pages of planning material for We the Living.

The Ayn Rand Archives has released the complete set of Rand’s planning material for her debut novel. The newly available content includes several outlines, individual chapter notes, and a variety of notes about the characters and setting, including details about life in the Soviet Union.

This release represents the latest milestone in an ongoing volunteer transcription project aimed at unlocking text from Rand’s handwritten papers. Over the past year and a half, volunteers using the FromThePage transcription platform have created complete, machine-readable transcripts of every single page. The platform hosts these documents and presents the transcripts and originals in a side-by-side view for easy reading and comparison. Thanks to those volunteer efforts, this material is now full-text searchable.

For anyone who loves We the Living and wants to view the material that Ayn Rand used to create the novel, they can now do so through this online access. To explore these documents and to discover new archival materials as they are released, you can view our institutional profile on FromThePage or follow the relevant links from the Archives’ webpage.