Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

Ayn Rand knew that the American public did not understand the nature of communism, but she did not know that she was trying to publish the truth at the start of the Red Decade, as it was later called. An anti-communist librarian had told her, when she was still working on the novel, that "the communists have a tremendous influence" on American intellectuals, "and you will find a lot of people opposing you." "I was indignant," Ayn Rand recalled years later. "I didn't believe her. I thought that she is a typical Russians and is, in effect, panic mongering."

For nearly three years, We the Living was rejected by New York publishers. It was rejected by more than a dozen houses. A typical rejection said that the author did not understand socialism. Gradually, Ayn Rand came to see how accurate the librarian had been. By 1936, she herself was writing to a friend that "New York is full of people sold bodies and souls to the Soviets."

At last the book come to Macmillan, whose editorial board was divided about it. One of the associate editors, who fought against the book "violently" (Ayn Rand's word), was Granville Hicks. Several years later, Hicks admitted publically that he had been a member of the Communist Party. After a bitter struggle Hicks was overruled by the owner of the company, an elderly gentleman who said that he did not know whether the book would make any money, but that it was important and ought to be published. (It is instructive to note that in 1957, the New York Times chose the same man, Granville Hicks, to review Atlas Shrugged for the Sunday Book Review.)

Granville Hicks once said, "The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."

I'd be curious to see if his attitude on censorship changed after reading Atlas Shrugged.