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E SSAY ON SOURCE S
PUBLISHE D WORKS BY RAND
The scholar of Ayn Rand has an enviable problem: a surfeit of published sources. Rand’s
enormous corpus of fi ction and nonfi ction, including bound volumes of her newsletters,
is readily available in libraries and bookstores across the country. Many of her speeches
have been reprinted in her nonfi ction books. In addition to work that Rand herself
published, posthumously her estate has released a steady stream of material, including
her earliest efforts at fi ction, her question-and-answer sessions at public speeches, transcripts
from writing courses, and volumes of her letters and journals.
Unfortunately, there are grave limitations to the accuracy and reliability of the putatively
primary source material issued by Rand’s estate. Discrepancies between Rand’s
published journals and archival material were fi rst publicized by the Rand scholar Chris
Sciabarra, who noticed differences between the Journals of Ayn Rand (1999) and brief
excerpts published earlier in The Intellectual Activist. 1 After several years working in
Rand’s personal papers I can confi rm Sciabarra’s discovery: the published versions of
Rand’s letters and diaries have been signifi cantly edited in ways that drastically reduce
their utility as historical sources.
The editor of the Letters of Ayn Rand (1995) acknowledges that “some of the less
interesting material within letters” and “the routine opening and closing material” have
been deleted. 2 These omissions are of high interest to the historian, for it is here that
Rand notes details of her schedule, makes offhand comments on recent events in her
life, and includes unique touches that personalize her communication. Looking at the
originals of Rand’s letters has helped me reconstruct the web of contacts she maintained
and track shifts and developments in key relationships. I did not discover any
changes to the body of her correspondence. The letters as published have not been
altered; they are merely incomplete. Scholars can benefi t from this material, but historians
in particular should note that important insights can be gleaned only from the
originals. 3
The editing of the Journals of Ayn Rand (1997) is far more signifi cant and problematic.
On nearly every page of the published journals, an unacknowledged change
has been made from Rand’s original writing. In the book’s foreword the editor, David
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