Myself, I figured this out back when I read her books for the first time as a teenager: The first copies I had, were from my parents' library, dusty old paper-backed editions of Anthem and We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged. I loved every page of them. I loved the passion, and the free-market ideals, which went well with the Reagan Republicanism my parents had taught me. And I especially loved the cover photo of Ms. Rand that was on the back of each book:
This slim, pretty woman with the dark eyes and the passionate stare was the very embodiment of the individualistic romanticism she stood for, I thought. Surely she was what Dagney Taggart would have looked like if she were a real person.
Those were old copies of the books that I was reading. It was no wonder, I thought, that they had an old picture, of someone who was after all, still alive, on the backs of them. It wasn't until I got to college and went out and bought my own copy of Atlas Shrugged, and saw that the author photo had not been changed, that I started to wonder. After all, this was what Ayn Rand looked like in the early 80's, when I started college:
I know, I know. We all get older. And precious few of us get prettier as we age. But wouldn't Dagney Taggart have shown what she looked like in real time? Wasn't that the kind of gutsy individualist she was? ...That her creator was? I won't say I went right out and got rid of all my Ayn Rand books or anything, but in my mind, this was evidence of vanity on her part, and I thought less of her.
Actually, her books sort of led to the same conclusion. They were romantic books, not in the Nietzschean sense that she intended, but in the sense that they resembled the Barbara Cartland books that I also enjoyed back then, when I was young and foolish. They were one-dimensional characters, who were either good or evil, and never nuanced or partly one and partly the other. And you could always tell whether a character was good or bad by how they looked. Dagney Taggart, heroine of Atlas Shrugged for instance, was slim and drop-dead gorgeous, while her rival, the cynical "moocher" Lillian Reardon was aging and running to fat. The plotlines were simple conflicts of good and evil, with the good always winning, and the heroine always ending up with the most attractive male available. Yes, they were basically romance novels, and after I grew skeptical of Rand's so-called "philosophy", that was how I read them.
