jbgotmar

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
NOTES TO PAGES 19–25
22. Rand’s change of name was fairly typical of Jewish writers and actors making
their living in Hollywood. See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews
Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988), 301, 372. Contrary to legend, Rand did not
name herself after her Remington-Rand typewriter, nor is her name an abbreviation of
the diminutive “Ayneleh,” as William F. Buckley Jr. claimed. Nicknames were common in
the Rosenbaum household, and letters from Russia confi rm that Alisa had experimented
with a range of possible pennames, including “Lil Rand,” before settling on “Ayn Rand.”
See Nora Rosenbaum to AR, March 23, 1926 and April 11, 1926, letters 21a and 24d,
Russian Family Correspondence, Ayn Rand Archives. Rand gave differing accounts of
her name throughout the 1930s. She told a reporter, “My fi rst name is Ayna, but I liquidated
the ‘A,’ and Rand is an abbreviation of my Russian surname.” In a letter to a fan
she wrote, “I must say that ‘Ayn’ is both a real name and an invention,” and she indicated
that her fi rst name was inspired by a Finnish writer (whom she declined to identify) and
her last an abbreviation of Rosenbaum. Michael Mok, “Waitress to Playwright—Now
Best Seller Author,” New York Post, May 5, 1936; AR to W. Craig, January 30, 1937, ARP
041–11x.
23. Biographical Interview 7, January 15, 1961; Harvey Goldberg, Oral History
Interview, ARP. Decades later, members of Rand’s extended family still smarted at what
they considered her failure to properly acknowledge or appreciate their help. More seriously,
they charged that had she fully explained the Rosenbaum’s dire circumstances
in Russia, the family would have brought them all to America, thus saving their lives.
Heller, 61.
24. Rand, Russian Writings on Hollywood, 77.
25. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941; New York: Scribner, 1993), 11;
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (New York: New Directions,
1962), 132.
26. B. Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, 73.
27. Marcella Rabin, Oral History outtakes, ARP; Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, ed.
David Harriman (New York: Penguin, 1999), 48, henceforth cited as Journals.
28. Journals, 48.
29. Anna Borisnova to AR, January 22, 1926, and September 22, 1926, letters 9a and
89a, Russian Family Correspondence, ARP.
30. These stories, which Rand never attempted to publish, were released by her estate
in The Early Ayn Rand, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: Penguin, 1986).
31. Lynn Simross, “Studio Club Closes Door on Past,” Los Angeles Times, February 9,
1975, L1.
32. Journals, 38. Rand’s willingness to celebrate a criminal anticipates the work of
later writers such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Cormac McCarthy, who all to
some degree portray the murderer as a person of unusual strength, sensitivity, or both.
A more immediate parallel for Rand would have been a book she knew well, Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a serious novel of ideas built around the psychology
of a murderer.
33. Ibid., 27, 37, 36.
34. Ibid., 32.
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com
301