The Journals of Ayn Rand

If you happen to be an intellectual struggling through the travails of achieving very long-range goals, then this book has a mother load of precious gems for you to mine. You have to work at it, though. You have to want it. You have to already know what it's like to sit day after day in front of a white piece of paper and force yourself to work—especially to solve difficult mental problems on your own. Serious intellectual work is tough going, and this book will show you just how tough it was even for one of the brightest minds the world has ever known, yet it will also help you to see how that same mind overcame those challenges. For me, reading this book was a little like having Ayn Rand come back as a ghost to hover over me, urging me on in my struggles to be a fiction writer, promising me that I will succeed if I work hard enough, employ good study methods, always engage my own values, and above all use reason as my guide. This book is not for everyone. Though David Harriman did a remarkable job of selecting the right content and sorting it for clarity and readability, it remains just what the title states: Ayn Rand's personal journals. It is not a diary. There's nothing here about personal hobbies, romance, or life's milestones. Only her writing notes were included so that the reader can see a straightforward record of the orderly mental processes that she applied to her work. Personally, I found this book to be challenging, informative, and highly inspirational — a fascinating look into a fascinating mind.

I agree with Stephen Cox, who writes on The Daily Objectivist website: "One of its best features is the large amount of plain good writing that one discovers here, much more than one might expect to find in an author's working notes. Rand does very well in the medium of brief and (as she thought) temporary comments. The volume contains many shrewd observations, vital expressions of personality, and spirited confrontations with intellectual problems." A great insight into a great mind!

There are very few people who believe nowadays that it is a worthwhile activity to discover how to think. This book is for such people. You will see diagrams that show relationships between events in Atlas Shrugged that you never knew existed. You will also find marvellous feats of abstraction which demonstrate an author's ability to "see a streetfight, then describe a battle."The downside to this book is that there is quite a bit of repetition, although with interesting variations. It's like a textbook that distills hundreds of mathematical instances into a an abstraction which is so general that you are bored - all the instances look like one another, since they all look like the abstraction.If you enjoy thinking - I mean, really thinking, not quoting "intellectual works" mindlessly in cafes - then I advise that you obtain a copy of this book, and *study* it alongside each of Ayn Rand's novels.

Simply a wonderful book. Starting before her first book "We the Living", continuing through her masterpiece "Atlas Shrugged", to the final years of her life, this is Ayn Rand's development as a writer and a thinker--as only she could show it. You will see her accept commonly held bad ideas early in her career, only to later discover their flaws and repudiate them. If you are interested in your own development as a thinker, there is no better guide than this account of the development of a master.

Although this book does not contain any of Rand's personal journals, it is still a worthwhile read. Most interesting is her outline for 'The Little Street', a novel in which the hero is a man who kills a priest who betrayed him. Rand regarded the character as heroic because he dared to stand up to society. Proof positive of her Niezstchean roots.