Ronald E. Merrill and the Discovery of Ayn Rand's Nietzschean Period

Abstract

In scientific and technological journals, it is customary to include in the first special issue on a mature invention or discovery a traditionally informal, first-person memoir of how the invention or discovery came about. Because Ronald E. Merrill died of myeloma in 1998, Reed has written an inevitably second-hand account of his discovery of Nietzsche's influence on the young Ayn Rand, and of the subsequent intellectual history of this discovery.