Barbara Branden

The 2013 edition of the New York Times bestseller revised, updated and with an important new introduction by the author. The Passion of Ayn Rand was the first full-length Ayn Rand biography ever published and this eBook edition is the most comprehensive biographical study of Rand available. Barbara Branden was a personal friend of Ayn Rand from 1950 to 1968 and wrote the only authorized biographical essay about her, Who Is Ayn Rand? To write this book Branden drew from over 40 hours of taped interviews with Rand and interviewed more than two hundred other people, including Rand’s sister, aunt and cousins, in-laws, associates from her days in Hollywood, and early conservative and libertarian friends. “Who was Ayn Rand?” asked George Gilder in the Washington Post Book Review. “The answer emerges at last in a superb biography written with much of the sweep, drama and narrative momentum of the great works of Ayn Rand herself.” This biography begins with Rand’s early life in Russia, where she was born and grew up amid the nightmare of the Communist revolution. The reader then travels with her to America, where eventually the “Ayn Rand nation” would make her a bestselling writer, avidly reading everything she wrote about objectivism, capitalism, Russian radicalism and moral philosophy. Rand wrote thirteen books, including the novels Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Anthem.  “A stunning biography,” wrote Roy A. Childs, Jr., “…rich in revelations that will add substance to a hidden life, and depth to an enigmatic genius who strode across the world's stage.”