Rarely has a writer and thinker of the stature of Ayn Rand afforded us access to her most intimate thoughts and feelings. Yet throughout her remarkable lifetime, beginning with her arrival in America from Soviet Russia as a passionately ambitious young woman, to her final years of unparalleled fame as a novelist/philosopher, Ayn Rand kept voluminous journals.

We share her painful memories of Communist Russia and her struggles to bring them to dramatic life in We the Living. And we see the step-by-step emergence of the characters and plot of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, along with the years of painstaking research that would imbue the novels with their powerful authenticity.

We witness Rand wrestling with the challenges of fiction writing and responding with her usual impassioned fire to the important social, political, and artistic events of the day. We are with her as she explores the questions of philosophy and builds the foundations of what will become the towering philosophy called Objectivism. There are tantalizing reflections on the legendary screenplay she wrote for Hollywood about the making of the atomic bomb - a brilliant piece never put on film.

There is even advice to the director of the famous movie version of The Fountainhead, and elsewhere an intriguing aside on Rand's vision of the place of sex in the novel and in life.