Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Timothy Sandefur, "Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Freedom in an Age of Darkness" (Cato Institute, 2022)
Description: In 1943, three books appeared that changed American politics forever: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Together, they laid the groundwork for what became the modern libertarian movement. Even more striking were the women behind these books: Paterson, a brilliant but misanthropic journalist whose weekly column made her one of the nation's most important literary critics; Lane, a restless writer who secretly coauthored the Little House on the Prairie novels with her mother; and Rand, a philosophically inclined Russian immigrant ferociously devoted to heroic individualism. Working against the...