Leonard Peikoff was born in Winnipeg in 1933. At seventeen he was invited to Ayn Rand's home, having read The Fountainhead as a teenager. The friendship and working relationship that followed lasted until her death in 1982. He studied philosophy at New York University under Sidney Hook and earned his doctorate in 1964. He later taught philosophy, hosted a nationally syndicated radio talk show, and co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985. Rand named him her heir.
He writes nonfiction, not novels. His subject is Objectivism, Rand's philosophy, and his habit is to trace how abstract ideas turn into history and politics. He sets out arguments in order and tends to build on one idea at a time.
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1991) grew out of a lecture course he gave in 1976. Rand attended the lectures and endorsed the course in print. The Ominous Parallels (1982) argues that the philosophical roots of Nazi Germany can be traced in German thought, and it warns of similar trends in America. That thesis is his own and has been disputed. The DIM Hypothesis (2012) applies a three-part scheme of thinking, which he calls Integration, Misintegration and Disintegration, to literature, physics, education and politics.
On WebToTell his name appears on editions of The Fountainhead, which carry his afterword to Rand's 1943 novel. Read the novel first. If Howard Roark's convictions make you want the reasoning behind them, Objectivism is the natural next step, because it sets out the whole philosophy from reality to art.
