This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Interest in the novels of Ain Rand has spiked alongside concerns of industries being nationalized in a deep recession.

Anne Heller's new biography takes a deeper look at Einrand, her thinking, her writing, and

her relationships.

It's entitled to Einr, in the world she made,

we spoke last week.

I believe that her literary reputation was in some degree influenced by her political reputation and I thought

that the time was right the left and the right having come stopped fighting

briefly a few years ago to look at her from a fresh perspective and see what outside of the ideological sources of her material influenced her.

And what did you find?

I found that like the rest of her childhood,

her ethnic background, her relationship with her parents,

the era in which she was born, the dollar decade in which she entered the United

States, her understanding of the United States before she got here, the industrial titans of the 19th century and so on,

all of it influenced her ideas, as well as particular personal experiences.

One of the better writers that I think she had interaction with was somebody who was also

someone who shared a lot of her ideas and that was Isabel Patterson.

What did you learn of their interaction?

Well Isabel Patterson was a good deal older than Rand in 1943 when they first met. She was the book review editor of the

or the book reviewer columnist of the New York Herald Tribune, which was an important paper.

They met because Iron Rand invited her to join a politically

...