Review of The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand

Title: The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature
Author: Ayn Rand
ISBN: 9780451088789
Year published: 1969
Year I read: 2022
Rating: ✫✫✫✫✫ that's shit from a butt
Recommended for: Masochists

Published in 1969 at the height of the Sexual Revolution, The Romantic Manifesto has nothing to do with it.

Quickly glance at the author name, and you’ll be grateful for that.

It can be dimly enlightening to read things where you disagree with everything the author says. It helps you have perspective.

Maybe Ayn Rand could have tried this exercise, too. Instead she describes contemporary artists and Zen Buddhists as people who “have not achieved a free, joyous, triumphant sense of life, but a sense of doom, nausea and screaming, cosmic terror.”

A sentence later, she describes O. Henry stories as being “consonant with the facts of reality and with man’s nature.”

A photo of O Henry, wearing a fancy suit and hat and carrying a parasol
Damn, O. Henry on some real shit.

Ayn Rand is entitled to write an entire book of sweeping statements because she knows all there is to know. There is no nuance in her world of objectivity.