The Early Ayn Rand

The first edition begins with four unpublished short stories written in the 1920s. The next section starts with a synopsis of Red Pawn, a 1932 screenplay that was Rand's first professional sale as a writer.^[3] This is followed by unpublished excerpts from Rand's first novel, We the Living, which was completed in 1934 and published in 1936. The section ends with a previously unpublished and unproduced play, Ideal, which was written in the mid-1930s. (Ideal was later produced in 1989 by Michael Paxton.)^[4]

The third section begins with Think Twice, a theatrical murder mystery written in 1939. Peikoff writes that in conversation about this play, Rand told him "She could not ... write a series of mysteries, because everyone would know who the murderers were."^[5] It is followed by unpublished excerpts from Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead – especially, the sections describing the relationship of the protagonist Howard Roark with actress Vesta Dunning, an episode of considerable importance in the original text and removed from the final version.

The revised edition adds two short stories. "The Night King" was a previously unpublished story written in around 1926. "The Simplest Thing in the World" was written in 1940 and previously published in a 1967 issue of The Objectivist and in Rand's 1969 book The Romantic Manifesto.

Upon its initial publication in 1984, the book received only a few reviews, which were mostly positive. These included reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press.^[6] In a review for the libertarian magazine Reason, literature professor Stephen D. Cox said the collection was "very interesting" and revealed details of Rand's personality, although the writing in the selections was inferior to her previously published work.^[7]

Looking back on the book years later, Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein said reading it is "a pleasurable experience" that shows Rand's "nascent virtuosity".^[8] In her article about Rand for Contemporary Women Philosophers, Jenny Heyl said the selections show Rand's "strong flair for the dramatic" and foreshadow themes from her later work.^[9]

• Berliner, Michael S. (2000). "Ayn Rand in Review" (PDF). Archives Annual: The Newsletter of the Ayn Rand Archives. Vol. 3. pp. 5–27. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 5, 2013.
• Cox, Stephen D. (April 1985). "Ayn Rand's Literary Journey". Reason. pp. 55–56.
• Gladstein, Mimi Reisel (1999). The New Ayn Rand Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30321-5.
• Heyl, Jenny A. (1995). "Ayn Rand (1905–1982)". In Waithe, Mary Ellen (ed.). Contemporary Women Philosophers: 1900–today. A History of Women Philosophers series. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 207–224. ISBN 0-7923-2808-6.
• Perinn, Vincent L. (1990). Ayn Rand: First Descriptive Bibliography. Rockville, Maryland: Quill & Brush. ISBN 0-9610494-8-0.
• Rand, Ayn (2005). Peikoff, Leonard (ed.). The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction (revised ed.). New York: New American Library. ISBN 0-451-21465-X.