Criticism Over Valley 200 Depiction of Ayn Rand

I read with great disappointment the June 12 Valley 200 (“Rand Just Shrugged at the Valley’s Charms”). In such a prestigious newspaper as yours and in a supposedly objective historical section, I did not expect to read a poorly researched, snide hatchet job. To wit: Ayn Rand explained the pronunciation of her name with “Ayn as in mine,” not with the belittling word ascribed to her by Patricia Ward Biederman. That Rand took her surname from a Rand Remington typewriter is open to dispute, which could easily have been checked if your writer had bothered to call the Ayn Rand Institute. Biederman’s purpose for including the unsupported, “Obviously, self-invention was the writer’s real forte” is clear. Ayn Rand was neither humorless (read her books) nor rigid. She did believe in absolutes, but these were based on reason--not dogma. “The Fountainhead” movie was not a failure, artistically or commercially. Ayn Rand did not hate Chatsworth but described her home, in a July 1944 letter, as “so lovely here that even I am relenting towards California . . . it is unbelievably wonderful just now.” Ayn Rand did not like Hollywood, which disagrees with Biederman’s implication that Ayn Rand was in a mad rush to leave Chatsworth (where she did her Hollywood work) to get there.

Biederman’s article is a desperate search for finding clay feet in heroes. Your readers, the truth and a great writer deserve better.

SCOTT McCONNELL

Researcher, Ayn Rand Archives

Ayn Rand Institute

Marina Del Rey

* The Valley 200 article on noted philosopher / novelist Ayn Rand was filled with factual inaccuracies and reeking with bias. (It began by saying her first name rhymed with “swine” and went downhill from there.)

Your reporter’s opinion of the illustrious former Chatsworth resident is hardly shared by most of us. When the literate members of the Book of the Month Club were asked to name the book that most influenced their lives, Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” came in second only to the Bible. Her books have become modern classics and continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year more than 50 years after they were first published. Ayn Rand’s manuscripts are in the Special Collection of the Library of Congress and her essays on ethics and politics are included in many college textbooks.

Ayn Rand is a proud part of the history of the San Fernando Valley--and of the human race.

BETSY SPEICHER

Thousand Oaks