control of my style and I knew how to achieve the same effect, but by simple and direct means, without getting too biblical.17

For those who want some idea of how in their own work to achieve “precision, clarity, brevity”—and, I might add, beauty, the beauty of a perfect marriage between sound and meaning—I am including as an Appendix to this edition a facsimile of the original British edition of Anthem, with Ayn Rand’s editorial changes for the American edition written on each page in her own hand. If (ignoring the concrete issue of biblical style) you study her changes and ask “Why?” as you proceed, there is virtually no limit to what you can learn about writing—Ayn Rand’s or your own.

Ayn Rand learned a great deal about her art (and about much else, including the applications of her philosophy) during the years of her hard-thinking life. But in essence and as a person, she was immutable. The child who imagined Anthem in Russia had the same soul as the woman who edited it nearly thirty years later—and who was still proud of it thirty-five years after that.

A small example of Ayn Rand’s constancy can be found in a publicity form she had to fill out for We The Living in 1936, a year before she wrote Anthem. The form asked authors to state their own philosophy. Her answer, at the age of thirty-one, begins: “To make my life a reason unto itself. I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities....”18

When I come across such characteristic Ayn Rand entries dating as early as 1936 (and even earlier), I think irresistibly of a comment made about Roark by his friend Austen Heller:I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes.... They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.19

One can imagine it of Ayn Rand, too. She herself was immortal in the above sense—and she achieved fame, besides. I expect her works, therefore, to live as long as civilization does. Perhaps, like Aristotle’s Logic, they will even survive another Dark Ages, if and when it comes.

Anthem, in any event, has lived—and I am happy to have had the opportunity to introduce its fiftieth anniversary edition in America.

Some of you reading my words will be here to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. As an atheist, I cannot ask you to “keep the faith” in years to come. What I ask instead is: Hold on to reason.

Or, in the style of Anthem: Love thine Ego as thyself. Because that’s what it is.

—Leonard Peikoff

Irvine, California

October 1994

NOTES

1 Letter to Richard de Mille, November, 1946.

2 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.

3 Letter to Lorine Pruette, September, 1946.

4 Letter to Richard de Mille, November, 1946.

5 Letter to Lorine Pruette, October, 1946.

6 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.

7 Miss Rand’s Introduction to 25th Anniversary Edition of The Fountainhead, p. ix, paperback.

8 Personal communication.

9 Letter to Cecil B. De Mille, September, 1946.

10 Letter to Rose Wilder Lane, July, 1946.

11 Letter to Walt Disney, September, 1946.

12 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Foreword, 1946 edition of Anthem, p. v.

17 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

18 A Candid Camera of Ayn Rand, June, 1936.

19 The Fountainhead, p. 453 paperback.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN IN 1937.

I have edited it for this publication, but have confined the editing to its style; I have reworded some passages and cut out some excessive language. No idea or incident was added or omitted; the theme, content and structure are untouched. The story remains as it was. I have lifted its face, but not its spine or spirit; these did not need lifting.

Some of those who read the story when it was first