Ayn Rand's only really great book was We the Living, about the Russian Revolution. The closest thing to an autobiography that she wrote. She had talent as a writer, but her ideology increasingly took precedence over her writing talent.
Hegel said that history is a chain of actions and reactions. Rand was the daughter of a prosperous atheistic Jewish pharmacy owner. She became the antithesis of Jewish (hence the changed names) and Leninism. Her worship was of money and people who made fistfuls of it. Instead of a cross or a star of David, she wore a dollar sign on a chain around her neck. We the Living is the story of how she became transformed from a Marxist into a writer.
Lamentably, she continued changing and became transformed from a writer into an ideological hack. Objectivism isn't a coherent philosophy anymore than Stalinism is. It's more of a godless cult, the flip side of Stalinism. Rand became the flip side of Stalin, or perhaps Lenin.
The Fountainhead was not nearly so good, but passable.
He best known work, Atlas Shrugged was not only way too long, but the characters were all cardboard puppets, like a Punch and Judy show on economic theory for adults who had no real experience with well-written novels.
After that, it was steeply downhill. She surrounded herself with sycophants and they urged her to write more and more polemically.
As for well-balanced, good writers tend to make really poor role models.
Mussolini funded a film based on We the Living, made at his new Italian Hollywood CineCitta, but when he saw it, he really hated it, because it was as much against dictatorship as it was against Marx. He ordered it destroyed, but of course, Italy is Italy, and a copy or two remained.
I don;t think it is very good. But it would be a great film to remake.
