Ayn Rand is best known as the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over twelve million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and ‘70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a “capitalist virtue” have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.

Anne Conover Heller traveled to Russia to discover Rand’s Russian and Jewish roots and her misunderstood youth, interview surviving acquaintances, and unearth new archival material. The result is the most comprehensive, revealing and unbiased biography of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century.

The acclaimed biographer presents “a perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher” and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Kirkus Reviews).

Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist–extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal.

Arendt’s first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations around the world viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, created fierce debate that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger.

In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”–one of those rare people who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.