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EPILOGUE: AYN RAND IN AMERICAN MEMORY 285
proved remarkably malleable, as underscored by the radically divergent
reactions to her novels. One fan wrote to her in 1957, “It appears that
there must be two books entitled Atlas Shrugged. I know that I never
read the book which some claim to review. Very happy that I was able
to get the one you had written.” 12 The many ways Rand has been reinvented,
remade, and reimagined are both an index of her popularity and
a reason for it. Though later in her life Rand insisted that her ideas were
not subject to interpretation, this imperative clashed with her earliest
beliefs. As she wrote in 1935, “The worst of all crimes is the acceptance
of the opinions of others.” 13 Many of her readers learned this fi rsthand
from Rand herself. In falling sway to her system and then casting it aside,
they learned how to think for themselves.
What remains of Rand, once the context and politics are stripped
away, is a basic ethical truth that continues to attract admirers of every
ideological persuasion. Be true to yourself, Rand’s books teach, sounding
a resonant note with the power to reshape lives. One of her readers
made the point in a brief fan letter. Lee Clettenberg was forty three
and living in Detroit when he wrote to Rand. He had only a seventhgrade
education, a twist of fate that left him consumed with anger, confusion,
and self-hatred. He struggled to improve his life, discovering,
“Every time I tried to claim a piece of me, I felt like a thief, a robber
of the dead.” But then came Rand. He stumbled across The Virtue of
Selfi shness, and there he found “the” question: “ ‘Why does man need
a code of values?’ BANG! Everything I have read and learned fell
into place, just like that. BANG! AND . . . just like that . . . YOU . . . gave
ME . . . back to . . . MYSELF!” 14 Though his letter was unusually evocative
in its folksy directness, the intensity of his reaction to Rand was typical.
It is this enthusiastic response that has made Rand’s prodigious novels,
dismissed uniformly by literary critics, into modern classics.
In a 1968 introduction to The Fountainhead, Rand was forthright about
the religious energies that pulsed through her work. She described the
book’s Nietzschean roots and registered both her disagreement with the
German philosopher and her desire to convey his exalted sense of life in
her novel. Rand argued, “Religion’s monopoly in the fi eld of ethics has
made it extremely diffi cult to communicate the emotional meaning and
connotations of a rational view of life.” According to Rand, the primary
emotions that religion had usurped were exaltation, worship, reverence,
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