Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzche.
I had come to the conclusion that she never read Aristotle. She didn't exemplify any relationship to "the master of common sense."
There’s much irony that Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum) were both born in St. Petersburg around the turn of the 20th Century, both eventually wound up in the USA, and both wrote their major work in English. The difference: Nabokov is now regarded one of the greatest novelists of all time, and Rand is regarded by any serious person as history’s consummate flibbertigibbet.