Ayn Rand was such a colorful individual that fictional portraits of her have figured in several novels in recent years. Tobias Wolff’s Old School is the latest of these. Wolff is interviewed in the November 12, 2000 issue of The Atlantic, where we find these references to Rand.

“It is 1960, and the unnamed narrator, a scholarship student from Seattle, is a senior at an East Coast boys' boarding school. A few times each year, a famous writer visits the schoo—in this particular year the line-up is Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway—and the school holds a writing contest in which one boy meets privately with the writer.”

According to Wolff, “I read the Ayn Rand section once to a group of scholars. One of them came up to me afterwards and said, "I've written two books on Ayn," and my heart just fell. I thought, Ah, hell, she's going to tell me I got it completely wrong. And she said, "You absolutely got her to life. That's exactly the way she was." I felt so gratified. In the end, you're making a character out of a real person and that's always very hard to do. I felt justified in using Robert Frost and Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway in this way because all three of them, to an extraordinary degree, very consciously crafted their public images. They cultivated certain personae to present to the world at large for their own advantage. And in each case, the images they concocted of themselves for public viewing were rather different from who they actually were. They were creating fictional characters of themselves, so I thought it was fair to meet them on those terms. Their own fictionalizing gave me permission.”

The interviewer asks, “Was writing [Rand, Hemingway, and Frost’s] dialogue intimidating or fun or both?”

”Oh, I loved doing it,” Wolff replies. “I got to have conversations with these writers, conversations I'd always wanted to have. And I enjoyed the research tremendously, though it did lead to some unexpected revelations.” One revelation was that Rand was far more popular with college-aged readers than either of the other two celebrated figures of American letters.

“I thought Ayn Rand was very much a creature of my time,” Wolff continues. “Well, I was doing the research at the Stanford University library, and almost invariably the books I was looking for on Frost and Hemingway were there on the shelves. Some of them hadn't been taken out, I'm afraid to say, in years. When I started doing my research on Ayn Rand, on anything about her or by her, I almost always had to put out a call order for it because some undergraduate had it. She is extremely popular still with people of that age.”

Sadly, Wolff’s view of Rand does not appear to be as sympathetic as the students’ is. “Her books continue to sell,” he concludes, “and, I'm afraid, to influence young people.”