Ayn Rand to High School Student: "Your questions do not make sense"

I am well, well aware that this is the sort of thing that makes her foes consider Rand an absurd crank, but to me it all feeds in to why I love her. See this report from the San Diego Union Tribune's web site on a high school student in 1963 who wrote various then-huge literary lions to ask them about the use and meaning of symbolism in their work.

Rand found his definition to be untrue--and thus "your questions do not make sense."

All the responses the kid (Bruce McAllister, now a writing coach and author) got, from the Paris Review. Writers who wrote back include Kerouac, Mailer, Updike, Bradbury, Bellow, and Ralph Ellison.

Reason on Rand. Hundreds of pages on Rand's life, work, and influence in my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.