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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comEPILOGUE: AYN RAND IN AMERICAN MEMORY 285proved remarkably malleable, as underscored by the radically divergentreactions to her novels. One fan wrote to her in 1957, “It appears thatthere must be two books entitled Atlas Shrugged. I know that I neverread the book which some claim to review. Very happy that I was ableto get the one you had written.” 12 The many ways Rand has been reinvented,remade, and reimagined are both an index of her popularity anda reason for it. Though later in her life Rand insisted that her ideas werenot subject to interpretation, this imperative clashed with her earliestbeliefs. As she wrote in 1935, “The worst of all crimes is the acceptanceof the opinions of others.” 13 Many of her readers learned this firsthandfrom 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 strippedaway, is a basic ethical truth that continues to attract admirers of everyideological persuasion. Be true to yourself, Rand’s books teach, soundinga resonant note with the power to reshape lives. One of her readersmade the point in a brief fan letter. Lee Clettenberg was forty threeand living in Detroit when he wrote to Rand. He had only a seventhgradeeducation, 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 robberof the dead.” But then came Rand. He stumbled across The Virtue ofSelfishness, and there he found “the” question: “ ‘Why does man needa code of values?’ BANG! Everything I have read and learned fellinto place, just like that. BANG! AND . . . just like that . . . YOU . . . gaveME . . . back to . . . MYSELF!” 14 Though his letter was unusually evocativein 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 aboutthe religious energies that pulsed through her work. She described thebook’s Nietzschean roots and registered both her disagreement with theGerman philosopher and her desire to convey his exalted sense of life inher novel. Rand argued, “Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics hasmade it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning andconnotations of a rational view of life.” According to Rand, the primaryemotions that religion had usurped were exaltation, worship, reverence,