The Passion of Ayn Rand
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Barbara Branden |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Ayn Rand |
| Publisher | Doubleday & Company |
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Publication date
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1986 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 442 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 12614728 |
The Passion of Ayn Rand is a biography of Ayn Rand by writer and lecturer Barbara Branden, a former friend and business associate. Published by Doubleday in 1986, it was the first full-length biography of Rand, and was the basis for the 1999 film of the same name with Helen Mirren playing the part of Rand.
Branden was a close associate of Rand's for 18 years. She and her husband, Nathaniel Branden, were leading figures in the Objectivist movement based on Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, and they operated the Nathaniel Branden Institute to promote Objectivism. In 1954, Rand began an extramarital affair with Nathaniel Branden. The breakdown of Rand's relationship with Nathaniel Branden in 1968 coincided with the closure of the Nathaniel Branden Institute and the expulsion of both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden from Rand's circle.
The Passion of Ayn Rand was an unauthorized biography intended to replace an earlier, authorized essay about Rand's life that Branden had written for the 1962 book Who Is Ayn Rand?. Branden drew in part on the same audiotaped interviews with Rand that she had conducted for the earlier project. The Passion of Ayn Rand also made the first public revelation of the affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden. In an interview, Branden said that she had undertaken the book in part "to rescue [Rand] from the need to be godlike. As I wrote, she was much more than that: she was a human being and a woman .... it is only in that context that Objectivism can be separated from its founder and its supporters and be seen as a philosophy which stands or falls by its own relationship to reality – not by the virtues or vices of those who espouse it."
The book was first published in 1986 in a hardcover edition from Doubleday. A paperback edition was released by Anchor Books in 1987. In 1999 the book was adapted into a movie of the same name that aired on the Showtime Networks.
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