Rodney Rawlings asks:

There was a time when you said you regretted ever publishing “Who Is Ayn Rand”? Has your attitude toward that book changed?

Nathaniel Branden responds:

Following my break with Ayn Rand in 1968, I reread the book and found it adulatory, weighted with hyperbole, and false in the picture of Ayn Rand it presented as, in effect, a “perfect” human being. Not that I didn’t still agree with much that the book had to say philosophically and literarily, but I saw the book overall as lacking in critical judgment and much too worshipful in tone.

Two chapters that made me especially uncomfortable were the one on psychology, because I was beginning to understand that my differences with Rand in the field of psychology were enormous—and the biographical essay written by Barbara Branden, which is less a serious portrait of a person than a publicity release. At the time the book was written, we were both enthralled by Rand’s vision of herself and subscribed to it entirely.

You will therefore understand why later, as my vision began to clear, that book was something of an embarrassment. That is what prompted my statement about wishing I had never published the book.

Now, more years have passed and I find myself wondering if there might not be value in preserving in some form—perhaps on the internet—the book’s lead essay, “The Moral Revolution in Atlas Shrugged.” It is not the way I would write the essay today, but as a piece of history it does convey very accurately the vision of Objectivism we all held at the time, and that I conveyed through my lectures on Objectivism at Nathaniel Branden Institute. For a crash introduction to “the Objectivist world” of the late 1950s and most of the 1960s—in other words, from the publication of Atlas (1957) to the time of the Rand/Branden break (1968)—I doubt that any other essay could do it better.

The other essay I wonder about preserving is “The Literary Method of Ayn Rand.” Again, my adulatory style is a source of discomfort to me; but, on the other hand, the essay does offer a valuable discussion of what Rand was up to as an artist and why, aesthetically, I admired (and admire) her novels as much as I do (even with all the reservations I am aware of today that I was oblivious to when the essay was written). As a literary stylist, she is appallingly under-appreciated. She was a genius at knowing how to make words do what she wanted them to do.

So, to say it once more, I look at these two essays as worthwhile historical documents containing much that I would still stand by although in some ways I might express myself differently now. And maybe one day I’ll find the right home (and context) for them.