Discussed in this essay:

Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller. Nan A. Talese. 567 pages. $35.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns. Oxford University Press. 369 pages. $27.95.

Ayn Rand never made modest claims for the importance of her work. As she told Mike Wallace in 1957, she believed that she was “the most creative thinker alive,” and that her ideas about the virtues of selfishness and the evils of altruism owed nothing to any previous writer, expect maybe Aristotle. She was an unforgettable figure on college…