As to your first concern: Rand says that she made embraced atheism when she was 13 years old, and that was the end of it. Never reconsidered that decision. Really now, does that indicate a mature approach to a very interesting and intriguing topic concerning the origin of all things? Barbara Branden, in "The Passion of Ayn Rand," recounts how Ayn overheard a conversation that Nathaniel Branden and other members of the "collective" were having about Evolution, and that she just threw up her hands in despair as if to indicate a "why would anybody want to have a conversation about that" sort of response. The issue of origins is a fundamental human question, and she admits that she never got beyond an intuitive response of a 13 year old mind to the question. That is why I said what I said. Even Anthony Flew has reconsidered atheism. My point is simply that her atheism seems to have been uninformed by any context of study. She just "knows." And that is typical of the college sophomore syndrome.

As to the second point: I do not agree that painters in the non-objective arena of art have no idea of what they are trying to convey or "say." I am a painter (representative landscapes and also abstract/non-objective images) and I think most artists who work in this manner do, in fact, understand at least in a general sense what they are after. Rand SAYS they do not know what they are doing and eve claim their own ignorance, but she shows no evidence of having actually looked into it. Did she ever critique, or enter into dialogue with the known statements of, say, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, or others of the genre? I have no problem with seeing some non-objective art as fraudulent and an excuse for a lack of skill, but to send up a blanket condemnation based on a very questionable claim (which may itself be an excuse for not taking time to think about what she wants to talk about) is weak. Rand's dismissal of other writers like C.S. Lewis ("evil") is also shallow and uninformed, even embarrassing, as is her ridiculous dismissal of Rembrandt's "Flayed Ox" painting. She understood nothing about certain things, did not want to take the time or put forth the effort even to know enough to offer a rational refutation, so simply condemned what she did not understand. This is the action of an authoritarian consciousness, not a rational thinker.

By the way, I remain a fan of Atlas Shrugged, but I am among a minority who think Ayn Rand's best novel is "We The Living."

A little of it is known. She started notes for a post-"Atlas" novel in the late 1950s - the theme was to be joy lasting out against irrelevant pain. The working title was "To Lorne Dieterling" - look it up on the web. This was evidently abandoned in the 1960s. I've heard anecdota about a later novel, which was going to have a lighthearted hero named "Faustin Donnegal" - search the web for that, too. A Rand scholar I've talked to says there's nothing in her papers about that one.

no. nothing