Well There You Have It

William Edward Hickman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Ayn Rand's The Little Street

In 1928, the writer Ayn Rand began planning a novel called The Little Street, whose hero was to be based on 'what Hickman suggested to [her].' The novel was never finished, but Rand wrote notes for it which were published after her death in the book Journals of Ayn Rand. Rand wanted the hero of her novel to be 'A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.'[3] Rand scholars Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Jennifer Burns both interpret Rand's interest in Hickman as a sign of her early admiration of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.[4][5] Rand also wrote, 'The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal...'"

In other words, Ayn Rand is the kind of woman who would have written love letters to Ted Bundy.