Charles Murray on Ayn Rand

Charles Murray writes on Ayn Rand.

But there’s no getting around it: taken as a whole, there is a dismaying discrepancy between the Ayn Rand of real life and Ayn Rand as she presented herself to the world. The discrepancy is important because Rand herself made such a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy. “My personal life is a postscript to my novels,” she wrote in the afterword to “Atlas Shrugged.” “It consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.’ I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books—and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters.” As both books [the Heller and Burns biographies] document, that statement was self-delusion on a grand scale.

 Incidentally, this is the 20th anniversary of The Bell Curve.