RAND, Ayn.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Pola Negri. First edition of Rand's scarce first publication, a biography of one of the leading silent screen actresses of the day. It was written when Rand was 20 and was her only book published in Russia before she emigrated. Her second work, also devoted to the cinema, was issued without her permission after she had left for America.Pola Negri began life as an assignment that Rand wrote in 1925 for her studies at the Technicum for Screen Arts in Petrograd, and it was issued in the publisher's Popular Cinema Library series later the same year. Negri (1897-1987) was a Polish actress who initially worked in her home country and Germany. In 1922, she signed with Paramount and became the first European actress to be contracted in Hollywood. Interest in popular Western culture was fairly common in the New Economic Policy USSR, but Negri's portrayals of independent female characters who overcame strife particularly resonated with Rand: "Her element is power, the eternal, invincible power of a woman. In almost all her films, she is a woman victorious" (p. 8, trans.). The actress's European origin and emigration may also have appealed to Rand, who received permission to leave the USSR in the same year that Pola Negri was published. Rand's interest in cinema continued in the USA, where her first jobs were as a film extra and a junior screenwriter. Her first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932, although it was never produced. Th

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