General Discussion

She base her philosophy and so called 'heroes' on a murderer.
In 1928, just two years after Ayn Rand arrived in the U.S. from Soviet Russia and settled in Los Angeles, she scribbled diary notes in her brand-new language that formed a story she called The Little Street. Its protagonist, Danny Renahan, is modeled on a real-life Los Angeles murderer, 19-year-old William Hickman, who strangled and dismembered a girl in a kidnapping-for-ransom gone awry.

In her notebooks, Rand makes a hero of both Hickman and the fictional Renahan, who murders a church pastor instead of a child, and extols the killers’ beautiful souls, which rise and set without a trace of “social instinct or herd feeling.” Of Hickman she writes, “A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet … That boy was not strong enough.” Meanwhile, Renahan “does not understand,” she writes quite rapturously, “because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.”

She died poor forced to accept social security which she hated...her long term secretary did not even attend her funeral...describing Rand as 'difficult'. She didn't believe in charity at all and believed the powerful had the right to tample the weak...her book are sickening.