| | I'm sorry, Casey, but it's obvious Barbara Branden got her information from the doctor, or less problematically, from a friend of hers who was told this story by Ayn Rand. I think--actually I can't say if I think or know here on SOLO--that it was from the doctor. Now, if it was the doctor, I thought that doctor/patient confidentiality extended beyond the grave, but if so that was the doctor's problem and issue, not Barbara's.
Barbara Branden made a decision that the biography would not be cluttered and bogged down with detailed attribution and references. It worked in the early part for obviously almost all the material came from the interviews she did with Rand in 1961. It didn't work so well, except literarily--PAR is a smooth read--in the later portions, but Barbara's ultimate tribute to Ayn Rand is that Rand's life was like a novel with a marvellous plot structure, including a tremendous climax and poignant denouement, so she made it almost more real than real that way.
My grandfather spent over 23 years, mostly in the Library of Congress, researching his Madison biography. One or two million of his words in notes were typed up on 3x5 index cards by his wife. They were put in the appropriate order and the bio was written off those cards. (It wasn't possible to do such with PAR for several reasons.) The friends of James Madison were not available to be interviewed and Irving Brant never knew those folks first hand, so almost everything came from documents and other written material. But after all the dust is settled and another significant bio of Rand is written, we will find that while PARC has provided a great deal of material to think about and evaluate, without PAR, which contains significant memoir material, we would not really know Ayn Rand except as a brain.
--Brant
(Edited by Brant Gaede on 11/30, 4:54pm)
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