Flannery O'Connor Weakly Dissing Ayn Rand
April 13th, 2015 at 12:00PM"I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."
--Flannery O'Connor, The Habit Of Being: Letters Of Flannery O'Connor
Ayn Rand loved Spillane and Dostoevsky and -- I think -- would have no problem with anyone comparing her work to either of them, though her work is obviously on Dostoevsky's level, and even deeper philosophically.
O'Connor's comment is beyond snarky; it's shamelessly baseless. She offers evaluations without facts to validate them. Ayn Rand's philosophy would break her of that.
I know O'Connor appears to be merely judging Ayn Rand's writing here, but she's being dishonest and rudely so. Sure, I'm defending Ayn Rand, but I also want to condemn Flannery O'Connor. And no, it doesn't matter that she wrote this in a private letter. It is wrong to smear someone else's work without offering justification.