More than 20 years after her death, Ayn Rand and her work con­tin­ue to find a voice in pop­u­lar cul­ture — from The Simp­sons to the video game ​“Bioshock” — and her nov­els— Atlas Shrugged, The Foun­tain­head, We the Liv­ing, and Anthem—still sell over 800,000 copies a year. In spite of this, Rand remains shroud­ed in mys­tery and mis­un­der­stand­ing. Draw­ing upon unri­valed access to Rand’s papers and jour­nals, Burns, assis­tant pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, bril­liant­ly unveils the life and work of this uncom­pro­mis­ing woman whose most famous pro­tégé is Alan Greenspan. Burns chron­i­cles the fail­ures and tri­umphs of Rand’s life from her birth in Rus­sia as Alisa Rosen­baum and her emi­gra­tion to the Unit­ed States to her life as a Hol­ly­wood screen­writer, her mar­riage to Frank O’Connor, her mys­te­ri­ous rela­tion­ship with Nathaniel Bran­den, and her phi­los­o­phy of Objec­tivism. As Burns points out, Rand devel­oped her ideas of Objec­tivism out of her hatred of the total­i­tar­i­an­ism of Com­mu­nist Rus­sia, and she pro­claimed an indi­vid­u­al­ism based on the inalien­able rights guar­an­teed in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence — life, lib­er­ty, and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. Her vision of indi­vid­u­al­ism pro­mot­ed the spir­it of free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism in which indi­vid­u­als estab­lished small busi­ness­es and inde­pen­dent entre­pre­neurs pur­sued their visions rather than giv­ing over their souls to large cor­po­ra­tions. Thor­ough, painstak­ing­ly researched, and adept­ly writ­ten, Burns’ study is bound to become the defin­i­tive biog­ra­phy of Rand and lucid­ly reveals Rand’s mys­tique both to Rand’s fans and to new readers.