Of all Americans who have appeared on the nation’s postage stamps, Ayn Rand is probably the only one to have thought that the United States government has no business delivering mail. In her central pronouncement of political belief—the character John Galt’s radio address, which begins on page 1,000 of Rand’s 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged”—allowance is made for the state to run an army, a police force, and courts, but that’s it.

Most readers make their first and last trip to Galt’s Gulch—the hidden-valley paradise of born-again capitalists featured in “Atlas Shrugged,” its solid-gold dollar sign standing like a Maypole—sometime between leaving Middle-earth and packing for college. Only a handful become lifetime followers of Objectivism, Rand’s codified philosophy, which holds that reality exists as something concrete and external, not created by God or by a person’s consciousness; that emotions derive from ideas; and that self-interest rather than altruism is man’s ethical ideal.

But a sizable number of readers seem tempted to return to Galt’s Gulch during leftward lurchings of the body politic. Sales of “Atlas Shrugged,” never less than robust, have these days been spiking, as commentators like Glenn Beck tout the book as an antidote to the supposed socialism of President Obama’s domestic program. Readers looking for rhetoric against government-sponsored health care will find a lungful of it in “Atlas Shrugged,” about two hundred and fifty pages (a hop, skip, and a jump by the standards of Randian narrative) before Galt’s broadcast.

Rand died twenty-seven years ago, at the age of seventy-seven. This month, the first two full-length biographies of her that were not written by disciples or apostates of her movement (some would say cult) are making their appearance. These objective looks at the first Objectivist, Anne C. Heller’s “Ayn Rand and the World She Made” (Doubleday; $35) and Jennifer Burns’s “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” (Oxford; $27.95), have different strengths and a shared weakness. Heller, a journalist and magazine editor, does the better job of dealing with Rand’s early life in Russia and her later personal dramas. Burns, a professor of history, more ably situates Rand within and against the world of American conservatism. Both biographers overestimate, Heller more seriously, the literary achievement of their subject, whose intellectual genre fiction puts her in the crackpot pantheon of L. Frank Baum and L. Ron Hubbard; it is no closer to the canon of serious American novels than Galt’s Gulch is to Brook Farm.

Born in Russia in 1905, as Alisa Rosenbaum, Rand was the daughter of two St. Petersburg Jews, a prosperous pharmacist and his socially ambitious wife. For a time, her best school friend seems to have been Olga Nabokov, a sister of Vladimir, though Rand did not generally play well with others. Marked by what Heller calls “extreme shyness and violent intensity,” Rand from her earliest days cultivated fantasies of overachievement that would separate her first from Russia’s Chekhovian lassitude and then from the levelling violence of its revolution. She never ceased admiring her father’s refusal to coöperate with the new Soviet regime, which by the early nineteen-twenties had reduced the Rosenbaums to a communal apartment with a smoky cookstove.

Rand’s days at the Communist-controlled Petrograd State University are depicted in her first—and least preposterous—novel, “We the Living” (1936), in which the heroine, Kira, tries to coax her doomed lover, Leo, toward a thunderous vow of resistance: “We’ll fight it, Leo. Together. We’ll fight all of it. The country. The century. The millions. We can stand it. We can do it.” As Heller points out, “We the Living” contains the only tragic ending in Rand’s fiction. A Soviet border guard shoots Kira as she tries to escape into Latvia.

Rand herself left the U.S.S.R. for America with a stamped passport and the sponsorship of some relatives of her mother’s who lived in Chicago. Her vision of the U.S. had already been shaped by obsessive moviegoing, and she was determined to make the Midwest no more than a stop on the way to success in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Even before leaving the Soviet Union, she had published a pamphlet on the silent-film actress Pola Negri, and like a movie star herself she now refashioned “Rosenbaum” into her own new name. Heller and Burns both knock down the myth that a Remington-Rand typewriter inspired the rechristening.

There is a greater factual basis to the legend of Rand’s having met Cecil B. DeMille before she worked as an extra on his production of “The King of Kings” (1927). On the set, Rand persuaded a costume director to promote her from a crowd of beggars to a crowd of patricians, and DeMille had his story chief look at her film scenarios, which were soon judged over the top. Rand achieved steadier success working in the R.K.O. wardrobe department, and then had a writerly breakthrough with a courtroom murder drama called “Night of January 16th.” Thanks to a gimmick that allowed each night’s audience to serve as the jury and thereby choose the ending, the play made it to Broadway, where Rand railed against the producers’ subordination of its incidental messages about the beauty of unbridled individualism.

Settling in New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (another “King of Kings” extra), Rand set seriously to work on the first of her two major novels, “The Fountainhead.” Writing the book took four and a half years, including the time Rand worked in the architectural offices of Ely Jacques Kahn, gathering material with which she could texture the professional world of Howard Roark. A visionary modernist forced to operate in a world of tired derivation, Roark is a man who will blow up a housing project when its construction compromises his elegant blueprints for it. Roark’s career has certain parallels to Frank Lloyd Wright’s (the novel’s Stoddard Temple is a version of the Unity Temple Wright built in Oak Park, Illinois), and Dominique Francon, Roark’s worshipper, nemesis, and confederate—a lioness amid poodles—is, by the author’s admission, Rand herself “in a bad mood.”

After blowing the deadline that Alfred A. Knopf gave her, Rand started taking Benzedrine to meet the one imposed by her new publisher. Bobbs-Merrill wound up bringing out “The Fountainhead” in 1943, to mostly bad reviews but eventually prodigious word-of-mouth sales. Rand saw the chance to become a right-wing Steinbeck, and hoped that the book’s championship of individualism might even help Thomas E. Dewey put an end to the New Deal in the 1944 election.

Heller finds the novel “phenomenally compelling,” possessed of a “thrilling intensity”; Burns, more warily, calls “The Fountainhead” a “strange book, long, moody, feverish” but ultimately “unforgettable.” It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization. Dominique is not simply, as Burns would concede, “highly stylized”; she is a kind of couture-clad Tesla coil. A reader doesn’t know whether to light her cigarette or to light his with her: