Night of January 16th - Ayn Rand

A success on Broadway in the season of 1935-36, produced countless times all over the world, Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16th has never before been published in final definitive form. As the author says in her Introduction, of particular interest because it is both philosophical and historical: “Up to now, I had felt as if it were an illegitimate child roaming the world. Now, with this publication, it becomes legitimately mine.”

“If any future historian wants to record my last advice to humanity, I’ll say that I found only two enjoyable things on this earth whose every door was open to me: My whip over the world and Karen Andre. To those who can use it, the advice is worth what it has cost mankind. Bjorn Faulkner”

After writing this startling suicide note, international magnate Bjorn Faulkner plunged fifty floors to his death from his penthouse apartment, rather than face the collapse of his mighty financial empire. Or did he? Was the note a plant and his “suicide” actually murder? Or is he still alive? In this brilliantly theatrical play by the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged the choice is left up to you.

The unusual innovation of trial by a jury selected from the audience was immensely popular with theatergoers who saw the Broadway production starring Walter Pidgeon and Doris Nolan. Because the play’s outcome is left in the audience’s (and now reader’s) own hands, suspense never lets up for a moment; no viewer can be sure of the defendant’s fate until the end of each performance. As Ashton Stevens, the reviewer of the Chicago’s American, expressed it: “. . . it is the fastest courtroom melo I ever saw. It shoots its stuff from a dozen angles, and every shot is a surprise. . . . There is a kind of genius in the play.”

But this engrossing play—by the world famous champion of individualism—is unusual for more than its theatrical devices. Classified by Miss Rand as Romantic Symbolism (or, in the terms of Objectivist aesthetics, sense-of-life drama), Night of January 16th pits against each other two diametrically opposed life styles and asks the reader to choose between them. One side is represented by Bjorn Faulkner (based roughly after Ivar Kreuger)—bold, arrogant, self-confident, passionately independent—who never appears yet dominates the play’s action, and by Karen Andre, his mistress, who sums up their basic attitude: “To him, it was only: you can or you can’t. To me, it was only: he wants or he doesn’t.” On the other side are the forces of conventional morality (or immorality?)—Faulkner’s lovely young bride, Nancy Lee, and his father-in-law, John Graham Whitfield, millionaire banker and philanthropist.

Miss Rand’s readers—who number in the millions—will eagerly welcome this play and its invaluable Introduction, which provides a fascinating chronicle of the production history of the play, an assessment of its philosophical import, and a link to the rest of her work.