Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness

In 1943, three books appeared that transformed American politics: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Together, they laid the groundwork for what became the modern libertarian movement. Even more striking were the women behind these books: Paterson, a brilliant but misanthropic journalist whose weekly column made her one of the nation's most important literary critics--Lane, a restless writer who secretly coauthored the Little House of the Prairie novels with her mother--and Rand, a philosophically inclined Russian immigrant ferociously devoted to heroic individualism. Working against the backdrop of dramatic changes in literature and politics, they joined forces to rally the nation to the principles of individual freedom that had come under attack at home and abroad. Sometimes friends, at other times bitterly estranged, they became known as "the three furies of libertarianism," and their arguments for freedom--made in the depths of the Great Depression and World War--helped changed the nation forever. Now, for the first time, author Timothy Sandefur examines their lives, ideas, and influences in the context of their times. Not a biography, but a story about personalities and intellectual history--about the literary, political, and cultural influences that shaped the destiny of freedom in America--The Furies is a book about the struggle to keep a vision of liberty alive in an age of darkness.