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WHO IS JOHN GALT? 1957–1968
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Saturday nights at Rand’s apartment remained the most coveted
invitation in Objectivist society. Most of Rand’s original group continued
to attend the weekly sessions, and they always tried to be together
on New Year’s Eve, one of Rand’s favorite holidays. As the clock turned,
Rand made a great show of retreating to her bedroom with Frank, who
would emerge later with lipstick smeared on his face. Rand extended
her favor to those who boasted extraordinary professional success or
intellectual or artistic talent, but the Collective remained primarily a
family affair. The only outsiders successfully adopted married in, such as
Charles Sures, the husband of Mary Ann Rukavina, an art student who
had worked as Rand’s typist when she wrote Atlas Shrugged. Around the
Collective orbited several loose bands of more dedicated Objectivists,
who might occasionally be invited to a Saturday night gathering at
Rand’s apartment or a private party hosted by one of the Collective.
Newcomers to NBI were directed to start with Nathan’s twenty-week
lecture series, “Basic Principles of Objectivism,” the prerequisite for all
further study. It was by far the most popular of NBI’s offerings, with
some students even taking it twice. Most Objectivists took the course
via tape transcription in the city where they lived, but Branden delivered
the lectures live in New York City, where he consistently attracted
an enrollment of nearly two hundred students each time it was offered.
Although Branden sprinkled his own psychological theories through
the curriculum, his course was primarily dedicated to a broad summary
of Rand’s ideas, covering her positions on reason, altruism, economics,
art, and sex.
The fi rst lecture situated Objectivism within the history of philosophy
and covered the “bankruptcy of today’s culture.” The next two lectures
were more technical, covering philosophical topics such as reason,
abstraction, concept formation, identity, and causality. A third lecture
was devoted to “the destructiveness of the concept of God.” The course
then began to focus on proper cognitive processes, mixing philosophical
and psychological concepts. It branched next into a focus on Rand’s
ethics, including a discussion of economics and capitalism. The last lectures
tackled free-standing topics such as the nature of evil, art, and sex,
including a lecture on “the nature and purpose of art” given by Rand.
The fi nal lecture promised to answer the question of why “human
beings repress and drive underground, not the worst within them, but
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