You sound like me..I loved her novels but would have never thought to become some devotee of her ‘teachings’ like a cult follower or research her life, etc.
The 1960’s and 70’s was full of authors and thinkers with cult followings...I just never had much use for stuff like that. In fact..whenever I sensed an author like that, I would run in the opposite direction...lol. I remember my hippie older sister coming home with a book called..’Be Here Now’ by some moron. I remember picking it up and thinking it was the stupidest book I had ever read...lol. Hippies everywhere carted it around like a bible or something.
When I was stationed at Ft. Lewis in the last years of the Vietnam war, my favorite hang out was the famous/infamous “Shelter Half” coffee shop in Tacoma, where I could argue politics with the radicals and watch North Vietnamese propaganda films.
Having read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead a few years before, helped me in my discussions there and I often saw positive reactions to my defense of Capitalism and American freedoms.