Back in 2009, I wrote an essay Retouching Rand, which discussed the Ayn Rand Institute’s efforts to create a better Ayn Rand. These efforts involved fibbing about Rand (for example, Leonard Peikoff’s claim that Rand quit smoking because she concluded it was dangerous, when in fact she quit because she got lung cancer, and James Valliant’s dishonest hit piece, The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics). A lot has happened in the past fifteen years, so it’s time for an update.
Retouching Ayn Rand’s Posthumously Published Material
At the time my essay was published, Jennifer Burns had not published her 2009 autobiography of Rand, Goddess of the Market. Burns revealed for the first time what was suspected: much of Rand’s posthumously published material was so heavily edited as to be essentially worthless. As described by Laissez Faire Books at the time:
One other area that I found of significant interest is Burns discussion of the various problems surrounding Rand documents made public by the Ayn Rand Institute, Leonard Peikoff’s organization. There has been a great deal of controversy over indications that ARI doctored documents. Some of this doctoring was admitted by ARI, which asserted that they merely made clarifications consistent with what Rand had intended to say. Burns, who has seen the originals, says this is not the case.
She does say that the letters of Rand, that have been released, “have not been altered; they are merely incomplete.” But the same is not true for other works of Rand, including her Journals Burns writes, “On nearly every page of the published journals an unacknowledged change has been made from Rand’s original writing. In the book’s foreword the editor, David Harriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own as necessary for greater clarity. In many case, however, his editing serves to significantly alter Rand’s meaning.” She says that sentences are “rewritten to sound stronger and more definite” and that the editing “obscures important shifts and changes in Rand’s thought.” She finds “more alarming” the case that “sentences and proper names present in Rand’s original …have vanished entirely, without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change.”
The result of this unacknowledged editing is that “they add up to a different Rand. In her original notebooks she is more tentative, historically bounded, and contradictory. The edited diaries have transformed her private space, the hidden realm in which she did her thinking, reaching, and groping, replacing it with a slick manufactured world in which all of her ideas are definite, well formulated, and clear.” She concludes that Rand’s Journals, as released by ARI, “are thus best understood as an interpretation of Rand rather than her own writing. Scholars must use these materials with extreme caution.”
The bad news is that “similar problems plague Ayn Rand Answers (2005), The Art of Fiction (2000), The Art of Non-Fiction (2001), and Objectively Speaking (2009).” Burns says all these works were “derived from archival material but have been significantly rewritten.” Rand scholars have long suspected such manipulation of documents; Burns confirms it with evidence she herself saw.*
As noted above, Journals was edited by David Harriman. Ayn Rand Answers and The Art of Non -Fiction were edited by Robert Mayhew, Objectively Speaking was edited by Peter Schwart, and The Art of Fiction was edited by Tore Boeckmann. Harriman is no longer associated with the ARI. However, Schwartz and Mayhew are. I’m not sure about Boeckmann.
