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FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944–1957
created a form response letter with brief biographical information to
cope with the inundation. Occasionally, however, a letter impressed her
enough that she would reach out to the writer. The fi rst missives that
Rand received from Nathaniel Blumenthal, a Canadian high school student,
went unanswered. Blumenthal sounded like a confused socialist,
and Rand had little time to tutor the ignorant. After entering UCLA as a
college freshman, Blumenthal wrote again. His interest in Rand had not
abated. This letter and his persistence impressed Rand, so she requested
his phone number. After a brief phone conversation, in March 1950 she
invited him to Chatsworth. It was the start of an eighteen-year relationship
that would transform Rand’s life and career.
When she fi rst met Nathaniel Blumenthal, Rand had made a good start
on her third novel. In contrast to The Fountainhead, she planned Atlas
Shrugged rapidly, laying out the essentials of the plot and characters in
six months during 1946, when she had a break from screenwriting. From
there it was simply a matter of fi lling in the details of the scenes she had
sketched out in a sentence or two. Regular cross-country trips helped
her visualize the book’s American setting. While driving back from New
York, she and Frank visited Ouray, Colorado, a small town tucked in a
seam of mountains. Right away Rand knew Ouray would be the model
for her capitalist Shangri-la, the valley where her strikers would create
their own utopian society.
Over time Rand had developed ingenious methods to combat the
squirms. A visiting cousin was surprised to see Rand pricking her thumb
with a pin, drawing dots of blood. “It keeps my thoughts sharp,” she
explained. At other times Rand would roam the Chatsworth grounds,
picking up small stones along the way. Back in her study she sorted them
according to color and size, fi lling the room with more than a hundred small
boxes of them. 3 Perhaps her most effective method was writing to music.
She tied specifi c melodies to different characters, using the music to set the
proper mood as she wrote their starring scenes. Rand selected mostly dramatic
classical pieces, so that as the plot thickened the music would reach a
crescendo. Sometimes she found herself crying as she wrote.
At fi rst Rand thought of the book as a “stunt novel” that would simply
recapitulate the themes of The Fountainhead, but before long she
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