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Out of a Gray Fog

Ayn Rand’s Europe

Claudia Franziska Brühwiler author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Lexington Books

Published:15th Aug '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Out of a Gray Fog cover

“As to Europe—keep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog.”—Ayn Rand (1905–1982) thus commented on the role of Europe in her key novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The same could be said of the way Europe features in her own biography and in the general perception of her persona. Even though Rand was born in pre-revolutionary Russia, she is nowadays considered anAmerican phenomenon, whose reach ends at the Atlantic shore. This book lifts the "gray fog" cast over her relationship with Europe, retracing the changing perception of the continent in both her fiction and thought. Her apparent lack of success with European readers is often explained by allegedly different reading tastes. However, a look at her publication history and reception shows that many factors played a role why her work found fewer European than US readers. Finally, an archipelago of European readers and admirers emerges which is testament to Rand's impact on European art and politics.

Claudia Bruhwiler has accomplished something utterly remarkable in Out of the Gray Fog. She has captured - in beautiful, nuanced prose - a series of undiscovered connections between European and American intellectual life, and in doing so she has brought to life an unknown Ayn Rand, preoccupied not just with questions of political economy but of overcoming her Russian past while articulating a complex of ideas, stories and narratives intended for audiences in the United States, Europe, Russia and beyond. This original, path-breaking book is literary and intellectual history at its very best; it is an indispensable study of twentieth-century ideas.

-- Michael Kimmage, The Catholic University of Ame

ISBN: 9781793636850

Dimensions: 228mm x 161mm x 24mm

Weight: 658g

304 pages