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EPILOGUE: AYN RAND IN AMERICAN MEMORY
its legal connection to Rand’s estate. It used Rand’s personal papers as
a source of revenue, releasing several new fi ction and nonfi ction books
under her name. As it became more established, ARI relocated to Irvine,
California, a region historically receptive to free market ideas. The institute’s
most successful initiative, an annual essay contest on Rand’s novels
for students, awards prizes of up to ten thousand dollars and has done
much to stimulate reading of her works. In the 1990s it established an
archive to house Rand’s papers and began supporting the work of scholars
interested in Rand, thereby raising her profi le within the academy.
As internecine warfare erupted between her followers, Rand’s standing
in the outside world plummeted. Ignored by most literary critics and
professional philosophers, Rand passed into the lexicon of American
popular culture, a signifi er of ruthless selfi shness, intellectual precocity,
or both. “Some people matter, and some people don’t,” one character
tells another, brandishing a copy of The Fountainhead, in the hit 1987
fi lm Dirty Dancing. On TV’s The Simpsons Marge Simpson deposits
her infant Maggie in the Ayn Rand School for Tots, where her pacifi er
is confi scated and she learns “A Means A.” In a second Rand-themed
episode, “Maggie Roark” ends up under Ellswoorth Toohey’s fi st in
the Mediocri-Tots day care center. These cultural references persisted
decades beyond her death and became ever more substantive. In 1999
Rand found her way onto a thirty-three-cent postage stamp. In 2008 the
designer of Bioshock, a popular video game, modeled his future dystopia
on Objectivism, complete with the art deco styling that Rand loved and
propaganda banners attacking altruism. The game’s ideological backdrop
was intended as “a cautionary tale about wholesale, unquestioning
belief in something,” explained its creator, who nonetheless professed a
sympathy for Rand’s individualism. 6
Rand also remained part of the underground curriculum of American
adolescence, beloved particularly by the accomplished yet alienated
overachiever. Arriving at a summer school for gifted high school students
in the early 1990s one participant remembered, “We were all
either Rand or post-Rand.” 7 Tobias Wolff spoofed this affi nity in his
2004 novel Old School, in which his adolescent narrator becomes briefl y
obsessed with Rand: “I was discovering the force of my will. To read The
Fountainhead was to feel this caged power, straining like a damned-up
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