We The Living - Revised Edition

Revised Edition

We the Living was not a commercial success when it was published in 1936. Macmillan did not expect the novel to sell and set it in movable type instead of making plates. Once the first printing of 3000 copies was exhausted, the novel was out of print. Rand's royalties from the first American edition amounted to $100. There was also a British publication, by Cassell in 1937.

When Rand's final novel, Atlas Shrugged, became a best-seller, Random House decided to republish We the Living. In preparation for the new edition, Rand made some changes to the text. In her Foreword to the 1959 edition, Rand declared that "In brief, all the changes are merely editorial line changes." Some of them have been taken to have philosophical significance. In the first edition, Kira said to Andrei, "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods." In the second edition, this became simply "I loathe your ideals." A few pages later, Kira said to Andrei, "What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" Rand's revision deleted this sentence. Some scholars regard this as a bitter description of communist treatment of the masses, not Rand's own evaluation.

The significance of these and other revisions has been debated. According to Ronald Merrill, Kira in the first edition "adopts in the most explicit terms possible the ethical position of Friedrich Nietzsche." Rand had made her break with Nietzsche by the time she published The Fountainhead. Barbara Branden says, "Some of her readers were disturbed when they discovered this and similar changes" but insists that "unlike Nietzsche, she rejected as unforgivably immoral any suggestion that the superior man had the right to use physical force as a means to his end." Mimi Reisel Gladstein merely commented, "She claims that the revision was minimal. Some readers of both editions have questioned her definition of 'minimal'." Robert Mayhew cautioned that “We should not conclude too quickly that these passages are strong evidence of an earlier Nietzschean phase in Ayn Rand’s development, because such language can be strictly metaphorical (even if the result of an early interest in Nietzsche)”. Despite Rand's own description of the changes, Susan Love Brown countered that "Mayhew becomes an apologist for Rand’s denials of change and smooths over the fact that Rand herself saw the error of her ways and corrected them."

Nearly everyone who reads We the Living today reads the second edition. The first is a rare book; the second has sold over 3 million copies.