I didn't know this.

Apparently, brilliant novelist Ayn Rand had a fan in past Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

According to today's Times:

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles ... Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

In fact, Mr Greenspan married a woman (first marriage) he met at one of Ms Rand's weekly "Collective" meetings, held each week in her New York apartment.

I have always been a fan of the book, Atlas Shrugged, and an admirer of Ms Rand's (and not just because she was able to seduce a man half her age ...).

In some ways, her philosophy (Objectvism) is at best a theory and not a practical form of living (at least, we can hope so), but what she wrote about (at length, over 1,200 pages in this book, alone) is amazing. Even more so today, 50 years after it was first published.

(Not everyone was pleased with the book. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times book review, published 13 October, 1957:

This Gargantuan book comes among us as a demonstrative work rather than a literary work. Its size seems an expression of the author's determination to crush the enemies of truth - her truth, of course - as a battering ram demolishes the walls of a hostile city. Not in any literary sense a serious novel, it is an earnest one, belligerent and unremitting in its earnestness. It howls in the reader's ears and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.

More: Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism - By Harriet Rubin (includes original Times review and Mr Greenspan's letter to the editor in defense of Ms Rand) - By , The New York Times