What Actually Happened Around Ayn Rand
My Years With Ayn Rand is a book by Robert Mayhew, first published in 1990. It collects firsthand accounts from people who actually knew Rand personally — not fans who read her novels and assumed they understood her, but the people who worked alongside her, argued with her over dinner, and watched how she treated service staff at restaurants. The title is somewhat misleading because it's not one person's continuous memoir. It's a compilation. I found myself returning to this book after years of reading secondary sources about Objectivism. Most biographies filter everything through someone's interpretation of what Rand "meant." Mayhew's contributors just report what happened. That distinction matters more than you'd expect if you're trying to understand the actual community that formed around her in Los Angeles and New York during the 1960s and 70s.
My Years With Ayn Rand: What the Book Actually Covers
The book is organized roughly chronologically and thematically. You get accounts from Alan Greenspan about economic discussions, from Edward Blum about the newspaper publishing venture, from Patrecia Scott about the writing seminars, and from dozens of others about the social dynamics that most people never see in the polished public image. There are pieces about the infamous birthday party incidents, the breakups between associates, the way Rand handled disagreement, and the surprisingly mundane routines of her daily life. What struck me most on rereading was how ordinary some of these people sounded before they became part of the legend. They were grad students, junior editors, struggling writers, and young professionals who got pulled into Rand's orbit mostly by proximity and intellectual curiosity. None of them were hardened ideologues when they arrived. Several of them left disillusioned. A few stayed for decades. A practical note about reading this: don't expect a defensive portrait. Mayhew himself was a close associate of Rand and genuinely admired her, but he lets the contributors speak for themselves, and some of those voices are sharply critical. The book includes accounts of Rand's temper, her rigidity on certain points, and the way the community polarized people who couldn't tolerate the intensity. That's useful because most discussions of Rand either mythologize her completely or dismiss her as a cult leader. This book sits uncomfortably in the middle.
Where to Find It
The book is still in print through Naremoor Press, which is the imprint Mayhew used for his own publications. It runs about 450 pages and retails somewhere in the $20 to $30 range depending on format. You can order it directly from their website or find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through indie bookstores that carry philosophy and intellectual history titles. It's not typically stocked in general browsing sections — you usually have to request it or search for it specifically. I should mention a specific problem I ran into when trying to get a copy a few years ago. The Naremoor Press website had been down or redirecting incorrectly for about six months, and I couldn't place a direct order. Amazon had it listed as "usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks" which turned out to be inaccurate — it ended up taking nearly two months because the printer was running behind. The workaround was straightforward: I called a local indie bookstore, had them check their wholesaler (likely Ingram), and they ordered it for me. It arrived in about ten days. If you're impatient, skip the direct online order and go through a bookstore.
What This Book Gets Right That Other Sources Don't
Most Ayn Rand biographies — Branden's, Sinsheimer's, the later works — are fundamentally narrative histories. They're trying to tell her story. Mayhew's book is different because it's archival in nature. These are people remembering specific conversations, specific events, specific moments. The value isn't in synthesis. It's in raw testimony. One counter-intuitive thing this book reveals: Rand was not the isolated figure most people imagine. She had a surprisingly wide circle of friends outside the philosophical core — people who disagreed with her politics, who weren't interested in Objectivism at all, who just enjoyed her company. The idea that everyone around her was either a devoted follower or an enemy is a simplification that doesn't hold up against these accounts. Another detail beginners often miss: the writing seminars she ran were not some grand philosophical lecture series. They were small, practical, and often awkward. People showed up hoping to get feedback on their manuscripts. Rand was blunt, sometimes helpful, often dismissive. The process took hours. Several contributors describe leaving exhausted and unsure whether they'd learned anything, only to return the next week anyway. That persistence says something about the community dynamic that no textbook explanation captures.
Limitations and What This Book Won't Do For You
This is not an introduction to Objectivism. If you've never read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, or For the New Intellectual, you will struggle to follow half the references. The contributors assume you know who Harry Jaffa is, what the National Review debates were about, why certain philosophical disagreements mattered. You'll get the gist, but you'll miss a lot of the subtext. The book also has a significant gap: it covers primarily the 1960s and early 1970s. The later years — the Schiller incident, the break with the Brandens, the final decade of Rand's life — are not well represented here. Mayhew himself was involved in those events, but the contributors he chose weren't always the ones who witnessed them most directly. If you want coverage of that period, you'd need to supplement this with Barbara Branden's Attraction of Opposites or the later accounts that came out after Mayhew's collection. There's also a structural issue worth noting. The book sometimes reads like a documentary with no narrator. Events are described but not always contextualized. A reader without background in the intellectual history of the era will encounter references to people and disputes that are never explained. I found myself keeping a separate document of names and cross-referencing with Wikipedia as I went. It's work, but not excessive work — maybe an extra hour or two of reading if you're unfamiliar with the period.
For people who want a more narrative-driven understanding, I'd recommend starting with a conventional biography first and using My Years With Ayn Rand as a supplementary source for primary voices. For people who already know the story and want to hear what it actually sounded like in the room, this book is hard to beat.
