time was simply an intensified feeling that I’ve had from childhood and from before the revolutions. I felt that this was so mystical, depraved, rotten a country that I wasn’t surprised that they got a Communist ideology—and I felt that one has to get out and find the civilized world.13

Ayn Rand got out to the United States in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. But she didn’t think of writing Anthem here—until she read in the Saturday Evening Post a story laid in the future:It didn’t have any particular theme, only the fact that some kind of war had destroyed civilization, and that there is a last survivor in the ruins of New York who rebuilds something. No particular plot. It was just an adventure story, but what interested me was the fact that it was the first time I saw a fantastic story in print—rather than the folks-next-door sort of serials. What impressed me was the fact that they would publish such a story. And so I thought that if they didn’t mind fantasy, I would like to try Anthem.

I was working on the plot of The Fountainhead at that time, which was the worst part of any of my struggles. There was nothing I could do except sit and think—which was miserable. I was doing architectural research, but there was no writing I could do yet, and I had to take time off once in a while to write something. So I wrote Anthem that summer of 1937.14

What followed was a long struggle to get it published—not a struggle in England, where it was published at once, but in America, where intellectuals, intoxicated by Communism, were at the height (or nadir) of the Red Decade:I intended Anthem at first as a magazine story or serial ... but I think my agent said it would not be for the magazines, and she was probably right. Or if she tried them, she didn’t succeed. She told me that it should be published as a book, which I hadn’t thought of. She submitted it simultaneously to Macmillan in America, who had published We The Living and whom I had not left yet, and to the English publisher Cassell. Cassell accepted it immediately; the owner said he was not sure whether it would sell but it was beautiful, and he appreciated it literarily, and he wanted to publish it. Macmillan turned it down; their comment was: the author does not understand socialism.15

For the next eight years, nothing was done about Anthem in the United States. Then, in 1945, Leonard Read of Pamphleteers, a small conservative outfit in Los Angeles that published nonfiction essays, decided that Anthem had to have an American audience; Read brought it out as a pamphlet in 1946. Another conservative house with a meager audience, Caxton, took the book over as a hardcover in 1953. At last, in 1961, about a quarter of a century after it had been written, New American Library issued it as a mass-market paperback.

By such agonizingly drawn-out steps, the country of individualism was finally allowed to discover Ayn Rand’s novel of individualism. Anthem has now sold nearly 2.5 million copies.

For the first American edition, Ayn Rand rewrote the book. “I have edited [the story] for this publication,” she said in her 1946 Foreword, “but have confined the editing to its style.... No idea or incident was added or omitted.... The story remains as it was. I have lifted its face, but not its spine or spirit; these did not need lifting.”16

Until her late thirties, when she had mastered English and finished writing The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand was not completely satisfied with her command of style. One problem was a degree of overwriting in her earlier work; she was still uncertain at times, she told me once, as to when a point (or an emotion) had been communicated fully and objectively. After 1943, when she was an assured professional both in art and in English, she went back to Anthem and (later) to We The Living, and revised them in accordance with her mature knowledge.

In editing Anthem, she said years later, her main concerns were:Precision, clarity, brevity, and eliminating any editorial or slightly purple adjectives. You see, the attempt to have that semi-archaic style was very difficult. Some of the passages were exaggerated. In effect, I was sacrificing content for style—in some places, simply because I didn’t know how to say it. By the time I rewrote it after The Fountainhead, I was in full