‘Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success’
By Alexandra Popoff
Yale University Press, 264 pages

The philosopher and novelist of supreme selfishness, the antagonist of altruism, the scourge of communist and collectivist ideology, the proponent of unfettered capitalism, the Russian Jew who renounced religion and aggressively advocated atheism: Ayn Rand receives her due in this concise and compelling biography.

Born Alisa Rosenbaum, Rand (1905-82) grew up at St. Petersburg, where she was encouraged in her studies by caring parents who braved the struggles of the Bolshevik revolution, the ensuing civil war, and the Stalinist suppression of individual initiative and political independence.

In 1926, Rand left Soviet Russia never to return, intent on a career as a Hollywood screenwriter, which began when she accosted Cecil DeMille on a studio lot and convinced him to give her a tryout. She was just learning English, but grappling with a new language did not matter so much when working in silent film.

Alexandra Popoff might have made more out of this silent film period, for it was a time when film was truly universal. The best silent films — like Chaplin’s — hardly needed subtitles, as the acting was so expressive and the plot lines so easy to follow. The confident Rand had no trouble considering herself the equal of her native-born fellow writers.

As with so many careers in Hollywood, though, Rand’s fell on hard times with the advent of the talkies and the Depression, and this is when — in a moment of dire need — she turned back to her Russian Jewish family, seeking and receiving the financial aid that was enough to sustain her as she rebuilt her career as a novelist.

One of the best features of Ms. Popoff’s short biography is that she never quite leaves Rand’s Russian Jewish background behind — as is befitting a book in Yale’s “Jewish Lives” series. Rand rarely made any public acknowledgment of her Jewish heritage, except when she spoke out against anti-semitism. Yet the rudiments of her character, as Ms. Popoff shows, had a Jewish foundation.

In her best-selling novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand created powerful male protagonists, resistant to any sort of regulation of their personal or public behaviors or businesses. These heroes are industrialists and engineers on whom civilization depends. When they go on strike, as they do in “Atlas Shrugged,” civilization founders.

Rand scorned the New Deal’s devotion to the common man and to what she considered the ignorant masses. She was uncompromising in creating fiction of a world that did not exist but that should thrive — if only thinkers and politicians recognized a great-man theory of history that is akin to Thomas Carlyle’s, though Ms. Popoff spends no time on Rand’s predecessors.

Ms. Popoff shows that for all Rand’s belief in self-reliance, when dying of lung cancer she was told she would have to enroll in Medicare if she did not want all of her wealth to be lost to medical bills.

What is missing in this biography, fortunately, is a screed against Rand’s politics, or her rejection of religion, which alienated conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr.  Ms. Popoff explains Rand’s beliefs and how she came to them, but does not judge her subject — an unnecessary task anyway, as the evidence, both in Rand’s favor and against, is assembled with remarkable efficiency.

Whatever convictions a reader brings to Rand’s writing, her narrative power is undeniable. Even her worst critics admit that her portrayal of powerful individuals and the way society plotted against them is fascinating.

How Rand achieved narrative power is never quite explained in this biography. The short answer is that while reading Rand, you may almost become a believer in the individual unconstrained by society — if you exclude a depiction of the society, family, and the very institutions that helped to make Rand successful.

Rand had no interest in the way governments functioned, in why bureaucracy was necessary — no matter how inimical  to individual enterprise it can sometimes seem. For that understanding of the individual and society, one has to turn to the writing of Rand’s contemporary, Rebecca West.

To this day, as Ms. Popoff shows, Rand has her followers, and a cadre of public figures who have been inspired by her conception of uncompromising individualism. Her women readers may wonder, though, why her female characters rarely show the kind of drive that Rand herself exemplified.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl.”