A Free Cartoon Biography of Ayn Rand: Her Life & Thought

Ayn Rand is one of the most divi­sive fig­ures in 20th Cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can thought. In some cir­cles, par­tic­u­lar­ly on Wall Street and in Wash­ing­ton DC think tanks, she’s seen as a patron saint of lais­sez faire cap­i­tal­ism. She preached the virtues of indi­vid­u­al­ism and decried gov­ern­ment hand­outs and tax­es before it was cool, after all. In oth­er cir­cles, her best­selling books are thought to be lit­tle more than jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of socio­path­ic behav­ior couched in stilt­ed, preachy prose. Whit­tak­er Cham­bers famous­ly dis­missed her final book, Atlas Shrugged, in a review for William F. Buck­ley’s Nation­al Review: “Out of a life­time of read­ing, I can recall no oth­er book in which a tone of over­rid­ing arro­gance was so implaca­bly sus­tained. Its shrill­ness is with­out reprieve. Its dog­ma­tism is with­out appeal.”

Yet Rand’s thought found a great deal of appeal among Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives. Alan Greenspan, the for­mer head of the Fed­er­al Reserve, was a mem­ber of Rand’s inner cir­cle. For­mer vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Paul Ryan and like­ly pres­i­den­tial con­tender Rand Paul are both not­ed fol­low­ers. Whether you agree with her or not, Rand is some­one you need to under­stand if you want to get a sense of what’s going on with Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. So for those of you who might blanche at the thought of wad­ing through one of her phone­book-sized tomes, check out Dar­ryl Cunningham’s car­toon biog­ra­phy of Rand.

Cun­ning­ham traces her life — her family’s loss of wealth and prop­er­ty at the hands of the Bol­she­viks dur­ing the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, her immi­gra­tion to Amer­i­ca at age 21, and her even­tu­al rise in fame and for­tune. Ele­gant­ly and con­cise­ly, Cun­ning­ham not only lays out Rand’s phi­los­o­phy but also paints a com­plex por­trait of a deeply con­tra­dic­to­ry per­son. All with the help of car­toons.

Rand preached the virtue of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty but she ruth­less­ly excom­mu­ni­cat­ed any­one in her cult-like inner cir­cle who devi­at­ed from her ide­ol­o­gy. She praised rea­son over emo­tion but her spec­tac­u­lar­ly com­pli­cat­ed per­son­al life was rid­dled with pet­ty jeal­ousies and long sim­mer­ing feuds. She abhorred gov­ern­ment aid for the poor but she lived on Social Secu­ri­ty at the end of her life. And per­haps strangest of all, con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent Amer­i­can polit­i­cal cli­mate, Rand vocal­ly sup­port­ed both athe­ism and abor­tion rights, but she has been utter­ly embraced by the Amer­i­can right.

You can see a page of Cunningham’s work above, or you can read his entire work, 66 pages of com­ic good­ness, at ACT-I-VATE.

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ics & Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry Explained with Comics, Start­ing with Adam Smith

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand Talks Athe­ism with Phil Don­ahue

Great Shake­speare Plays Retold with Stick Fig­ures in Three Sim­ple Draw­ings

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.