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ESSAY ON SOURCES
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Fortunately, primary source material on Rand’s life can be found in numerous other
venues. The Ayn Rand Papers at the Library of Congress include drafts, typescripts, and
galleys of Anthem, We the Living, and Atlas Shrugged and miscellaneous administrative
material. The collection also contains seventy-two handwritten essays written between
1971 and 1974 for the Ayn Rand Letter. Also at the Library of Congress, the William
Rusher Papers contain material on the Rand-infl ected young conservative movement.
The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, holds several important
collections, including the papers of Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane, which
contain extensive correspondence from Rand. Relevant items in the papers of William
Mullendore can also be found here. Other important material is in the Rothbard
Papers at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Leonard Read papers at the Foundation
for Economic Education, the Sidney Hook papers at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, and the William F. Buckley papers at Yale University.
Numerous primary source materials on Rand are also scattered among private
individuals. Barbara Branden retains personal correspondence, sundry materials, and
transcripts of the interviews she conducted with Rand in the 1960s, as well as tapes of
interviews used in her 1986 biography of Rand. A large swath of Rand’s papers was sold at
auction by Barbara Branden and Robert Hessen in the mid-1980s. Some of this material
was purchased by the Ayn Rand Estate, but the bulk was purchased by manuscript dealers
who have resold the individual pieces. More material undoubtedly lies in the attics
and basements of former Objectivists. Recordings of lectures by Rand, Peikoff, and the
Brandens are also available through several Objectivist and libertarian organizations.
The Objectivist community retains a strong sense of its own history and is a rich
source of material on Rand’s cultural impact. The Objectivist Oral History Project, sponsored
by the Atlas Society, has interviewed many of the major players of Objectivism
and sells DVDs of their interviews. The now defunct Full Context magazine for many
years ran a series of interviews with former Objectivists that give a vivid picture of the
Objectivist subculture.
I also made use of unedited interview transcripts and edited video recordings of
nearly a hundred individuals who knew Ayn Rand. These interviews were either conducted
by me, uncovered in archives, created by the Objectivist Oral History Project, or
recorded as part of a similar initiative at the Ayn Rand Institute. They contain the usual
liabilities of oral history, that is, distorted memory and personal bias, but used in tandem
with archival documents they are an invaluable resource. A full listing of interviews
used is given in the bibliography.
For research on the libertarian movement that grew out of Rand’s ideas, the best
sources are archival collections at the University of Virginia and Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution. The University of Virginia holds a large but as yet largely unprocessed
accession from Roger MacBride, Rose Wilder Lane’s heir and the second Libertarian
Party presidential candidate. At the Hoover Institution the papers of Williamson Evers,
Patrick Dowd, Roy Childs, and David Walter illuminate early libertarianism. Material of
interest can also be found in the Gordon Hall and Grace Hoag Collection of Dissenting
and Extremist Printed Propaganda, John Hay Library, Brown University, and the William
Rusher Papers at the Library of Congress.
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