THE MOST IMPORTANT PRIVATELY OWNED ARCHIVE OF AYN RAND MANUSCRIPTS, Photographs, and Memorabilia.

Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s unprecedented moral defense of capitalism − man’s right to exist for his own sake, to pursue the work of his choice, to keep the rewards of his labor. She demonstrates that capitalism demands and rewards the best of every person, according to his/her interests and abilities.

 The Atlas Shrugged Manuscripts

Twenty of the approximately twenty-nine surviving pages of the original heavily corrected and revised manuscript draft of Atlas Shrugged crown this collection. Rand gave these pages to her closet friend, assistant and first biographer, Barbara Branden, These were sold by Branden at a special auction, November 18, 1998.

“My prized possession,” Branden wrote in the preface to the auction catalog, “is the original manuscript pages of Atlas Shrugged, written in Ayn’s strong, angular hand – a gift I have treasured for forty years. Touching these pages sweeps me back to the years of reading the manuscript as Ayn was writing it — the excitement of being carried into a saner universe than the one I knew — the job of discovering the answers to so many questions that had seemed to have no answer – the ecstatic sense of encountering, on each page, a mind of such power and range that I knew I would never find its equal again. I think of the sense, through those years, that her fictional heroes, John Galt and Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden and Francisco d’Anconia, were becoming intimate and well-loved friends, almost as real as my other friends, almost as real as Ayn Rand.”

In order to understand heavy industry -- railroads, steel, oil, copper -- Rand collected and read a small library of books including This Fascinating Railroad Business by Robert Selph Henry. In the collection is her copy of this book, annotated by her throughout.

Conceptual Foundations of Business: an Outline of the Major Ideas Sustaining Business Enterprise in the Western World by Richard Eells and Clarence Walton, another research source, and it, heavily annotated by Rand, is included in this collection together with another six books, all annotated by her as well. 

A special copy of The Fountainhead presented to her and signed by all the movie cast members, as well as a copy of the screenplay, is also in the collection.

 
Other Seminal Rand Manuscripts

“The Fascist New Frontier” Manuscript. Dated December 14, 1962, the fifty-three-page autograph manuscript remains one of Rand’s most provocative lectures (Ford Hall Forum, Boston, Dec. 16, 1962). “The Fascist New Frontier” draws striking parallels between the economic policies of fascism and President Kennedy’s signature program. After quoting directly from Nazi documents, Hitler’s speeches and Kennedy’s own inaugural address, Rand writes: ”The basic moral principle running through all these statements is clear: the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the collective….[M]ost people believe that the ‘liberals’ lean toward some diluted version of socialism…. The grim historical joke is on them: the New Frontier, which they dare not fully identify, is not a version of socialism, but of fascism.”

After citing specific examples of increasing government control, which read like passages purloined from Atlas Shrugged, Rand concludes: “It makes no difference whether government controls favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half-a-century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins—except the ruling clique.”

The Los Angeles Times Manuscripts. The Autograph Manuscript drafts of her twenty-four (of twenty-six) columns written for publication in the Los Angeles Times newspaper, 261 pages, eight by ten inches, June through December, 1962. In her first column, she would be “Introducing Objectivism,” defining the philosophic framework underlying the widely varied, distinctive issues/events she will identify and elucidate in her next twenty-five columns.

Though she happily nicknamed herself "girl reporter," Rand's perspective on then-current events is that of the grand historian's, whose time -frame is the centuries and whose mission is to explain events by exposing timeless principles. These 1962 commentaries illuminate still, whether she is scrutinizing Algeria's civil war, or England's entry into the Common Market, or the murderers of Marilyn Monroe.

 Aghast when Rand was about to tear up a draft of an article, her personal assistant, (later distinguished historian), Robert Hessen asked Ayn Rand: "How would you feel if one of Aristotle’s manuscripts had survived and you were able to see it?" 

Hessen continues: "‘But I have no need for drafts of every article I ever write,’ she said. ‘Well, then, if you are going to throw them away, you can give them to me.’ ‘What for?’ she asked, ‘what will you do with them?’ ‘Frankly, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but someday they may be valuable.’ ‘O.K., Bob, but I do not want anyone to see my editing. I will have to rewrite these pages, so no one will see that I changed words or crossed out sentences,’ ‘No, no, Ayn, don’t do that. I promise never to show them to anyone during your lifetime.’ She handed me back that first article and continued to give me articles.”

Ayn Rand Photograph Collection

As Ayn Rand finished the last page of Atlas and wrote “The end,” she stood up from her desk and Branden snapped a photograph of her. The original is in this collection; it appeared in Branden’s biography of Rand. “I gaze at the photograph I took of an elated Ayn as she stood with her hand on the just- completed manuscript of Atlas. I remember that evening with an overwhelming immediacy; I feel again Ayn’s excitement and mine and that of our friends who had gathered in her apartment. We believed that we were present at a turning point in man’s intellectual history – and, much later, as Ayn’s fame and influence came to circle the globe, I know that we had indeed been witnesses to history.”

The photo collection includes another picture in Branden’s biography: four year old Alice Rosenbaum sitting on her maternal grandfather’s lap. More than 50 original photographs of Rand and her husband with the Brandens and their friends. 

NBL begins--NBI ends.

Finally, the archive includes many materials relating to the formation of Nathaniel Branden Lectures, eventually Nathaniel Branden Institute, course announcements, course notes, typed letters signed and handwritten notes from both Brandens -- as they attempted to contribute to the course of history. A typed document, written and signed by Ayn Rand, August 25, 1968, concludes her association with NBI and any/all of its affiliates. 

Original recordings of all 20 lectures of NBI's course "Basic Principles of Objectivism" are also included.