An acolyte of Ayn Rand has found himself, perhaps fittingly, in a battle with the federal government over ownership of two pages of the libertarian icon’s handwritten first draft of The Fountainhead.
Writer Leonard Peikoff, a leading authority on Rand’s antigovernment, pro-individual philosophy of objectivism, inherited the manuscript, along with those of Atlas Shrugged and two other books, when she died in 1982, the Los Angeles Times reported March 5. When he donated the materials to the Library of Congress in 1991, he kept the first and last pages of the 2,158-page Fountainhead manuscript for sentimental reasons, replacing them with photocopies. In a 1998 Los Angeles Times Magazine article Peikoff joked, “I stole the first and last pages.” Shortly thereafter, LC officials claimed the pages were the property of the government and demanded that Peikoff surrender them or face a lawsuit for $1.1 million. In January a federal agent came to Peikoff’s home in Irvine, California, and confiscated the pages.
“Ayn Rand, I feel sure, would have said: ‘The whole case is another outrage by looting bureaucrats so drunk with power that they must possess and flaunt even the very pages in which I have denounced them,’” Peikoff told the Times.
LC officials said Peikoff had signed a paper giving the government ownership of Rand’s papers and a letter stating he had sent “the complete materials.” In a federal court complaint the government said, “The library did not know that Dr. Peikoff had kept two pages of the manuscript.”
Posted MArch 11, 2002.