Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness

Goldwater Institute vice president Sandefur (Frederick Douglass) offers an intriguing if uneven account of three women who pioneered modern-day libertarianism. Influenced by the 1920s “Revolt from the Village” literary movement, which critiqued “so-called bourgeois values,” and by the “drastic changes” wrought by the New Deal, authors Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand advocated for “individualism as a moral and cultural phenomenon.” The irascible Paterson promoted her proto-libertarian views in her 1943 nonfiction book The God of the Machine. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, exalted individual achievement in her novels Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land. In 1941, Russian immigrant Ayn Rand, who published her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead, two years later, tried unsuccessfully to recruit Paterson (who “did not like joining groups”) for an organized “intellectual movement for individualism.” According to Sandefur, the trio formed a stimulating if contentious friendship, with the importance of God and religion a particular point of disagreement. Lengthy historical digressions occasionally overshadow the book’s main subjects, and those hoping for nuanced analysis of the links between their writings and their personal lives will be disappointed. Still, this is an accessible introduction to the origins of a powerful political movement. Illus. (Nov.)