For these avowed right-wingers, Rand serves as a touchstone because of her willingness to claim, contrary to centuries of religious teachings and cultural accretions, that nobody owes anyone anything: not kindness, not love, not mercy. Rand’s devotees include, but are not limited to: Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan (who has now distanced himself from his former enthusiasm) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas former New Mexico governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Gary Johnson Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, another 2016 Republican possibility and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is also up for the 2016 Republican ticket. Indeed, it would be remiss to discuss Rand’s work without providing a brief overview of her fondest admirers, whose perches in the halls of power help explain the outsized influence of perhaps the least lyrical, longest-winded, most humorless writer ever to sell more than 25 million copies. if he has become an immortal in his field whose every word, early or late, is avidly consumed by a large body of readers and growing number of scholars.” Rand fits this bill, and it is purely on her devotees’ account that Ideal has been released.

“It is a common practice,” Peikoff writes in Ideal’s introduction, “to bring out juvenilia, his early, faltering attempts. After discovering the novel among the late philosophizer’s papers, Peikoff and a cadre of Rand enthusiasts made the Promethean decision to present it to the world.

Now, for the first time, the original novel has been released, thanks to Leonard Peikoff, heir to the Rand estate and founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, an organization aimed at evangelizing for Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

We the living book