Claudia Bruhwiler has accomplished something utterly remarkable in Out of the Gray Fog. She has captured - in beautiful, nuanced prose - a series of undiscovered connections between European and American intellectual life, and in doing so she has brought to life an unknown Ayn Rand, preoccupied not just with questions of political economy but of overcoming her Russian past while articulating a complex of ideas, stories and narratives intended for audiences in the United States, Europe, Russia and beyond. This original, path-breaking book is literary and intellectual history at its very best; it is an indispensable study of twentieth-century ideas.