A review in the San Francisco Chronicle by T.J. Stiles

Excerpt: Early in "Ayn Rand and the World She Made," Anne C. Heller describes Rand's large, dark eyes as "exquisite." I'm not sure I agree.

Judging from the cover portrait, Rand had the eyes of a hawk between meals - a predator that is well fed, but far from satisfied. I was surprised to learn that she owned a cat. I can more easily imagine Rand devouring it than rubbing it behind the ears.

I'm being unfair, not so much to Rand as to this splendid account. Heller has taken the forbidding author of the novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" and made her real, a person of greater complexity than Rand herself would admit. Her book appears simultaneously with Jennifer Burns' "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" (Oxford University Press; 369 pages; $27.95), and the two are often reviewed together. It is no slight to Burns' well-regarded study to say that Heller's biography deserves its own review.

Her subject is not an easy one. Rand was aggressively polarizing. Over the years, she deliberately eliminated any room for common ground. She wrote stylized parables with heroic, superior individuals who battled the envious, collectivist mob. She saw altruism as evil and selfishness as good. No nuance for her.

As a result, readers tend to either adore or despise Rand. One of Heller's achievements, then, is to take Rand's ideas seriously, without falling into adulation or derision. Indeed, she crafts a narrative that gains force from its engagement with Rand's writing. Yet this is very much the story of Rand's life, underscoring the contradictions between her strident philosophy and her very human, very messy existence.

Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum to middle-class Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. From the start, she was extraordinarily headstrong and intelligent. Later she would insist that she was entirely original, that her philosophy was her own creation, that she had erased the past. But Heller convincingly argues that growing up Russian, and Jewish in Russia, shaped Rand's outlook to the end.

Rand came by her individualism honestly. As fictionalized in her novel "We the Living," she and her family endured oppression and deprivation in the Russian Revolution - the wellspring of all her work - unleashed in the name of the collective good. When she escaped to the United States in 1926, she encountered intellectuals who romanticized Bolshevik rule. The experience reinforced her self-image as a persecuted outsider, a prophet warning a great nation gone astray.

But the contradictions began early on, and multiplied as she gained prominence. This woman who lived for ideas and derided the masses went to work in Hollywood, after a rather fantastic encounter with Cecil B. DeMille, and labored in the dream factories for much of her life. She was an unabashed hero worshiper, exalting the arrogant, self-sufficient genius; yet she married Frank O'Connor, a genial bit actor whose chief merits were good looks, good manners and an ability to get along with Rand. She espoused pure self-esteem, yet craved popular acceptance. She once declared that she would not be happy until "The Fountainhead" sold 100,000 copies. (It was an absurd idea at the time; today there are 6 million copies in print.)

It is to Heller's credit that she never labels Rand a hypocrite. Instead she portrays a sharp and quick thinker who scythed anyone who dared debate her - a woman whose brilliance blinded her to her own failings. Rand lacked empathy, usually a fatal flaw in a novelist. But, as Heller's title suggests, Rand created a world of thought, a self-contained, atheistic, rational philosophy that centered entirely on the individual.

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