Read it against its critics.
Every primary text on this page ships beside the strongest thing written against it. Not as balance for its own sake — because of a specific hazard in this particular body of work.
Where this goes, stated up front: this page will send you to other people's sites to do the actual reading. It hosts no texts of its own, and the reason is in the last section.
WHY THE PAIRING
Rand's primary texts are unusually persuasive as rhetoric. Galt's speech and Roark's courtroom scene convert by momentum and moral clarity, and it is entirely possible to finish either with total conviction and no ability to reconstruct the argument that produced it. That is assent by aesthetics — which, in her own vocabulary, is second-handedness self-administered. You would have taken the conclusion on the authority of how it was delivered.
The correction is structural rather than moral: never read the primary alone. Each pair below puts the text beside the person who found the weakest joint in it, so that whatever survives is something you checked rather than something that swept you along. If that produces disagreement with the spine of this section, the section counts that as working correctly — declining is a legitimate outcome.
START HERE
The argument the whole spine rests on: you do not get to choose whether you have a philosophy, only whether you chose it. Start here rather than with the novels, for a reason that is about you and not about her — the room she delivered it to was four hundred graduating cadets who would have said philosophy was irrelevant to their work. The audience matches. Forty-one minutes.
Written by the man who built the psychology inside her circle and was expelled from it. He takes the benefits seriously and then names the failure mode this specific philosophy tends to produce in the people who adopt it: moralism, emotional repression, and deference to authority inside a movement that preaches independence. Nobody hostile to the ideas could have written it, which is exactly what makes it land.
THE JOINT WORTH ATTACKING
Her fullest statement of the derivation the map marks in gold: from a living thing facing the alternative of existence or non-existence, to life as the standard of value, to rationality as the primary virtue. This is the essay to read slowly, because it is the one place the crossing from is to ought is actually attempted rather than assumed.
A libertarian philosopher sympathetic to where she ends up, taking apart how she gets there. He goes directly at the values clause — whether "man's life requires reason" can yield "your life is the standard" — and the replies from her defenders are real but not decisive. Sympathetic scholars still disagree about what her ultimate value even is: survival, survival qua rational being, or happiness.
WHY NOTHING IS HOSTED HERE
Every text on this page is under copyright, and this section will not reproduce them. That is partly the law and mostly the argument: a philosophy whose central virtue is that you do not take what is not yours, hosted on a page that took it, would refute itself more efficiently than any critic could.
So the links go to the rights-holders — the Ayn Rand Institute for the West Point address, the journal and Branden's own estate for the critique. Where a text is only available to buy or borrow, the page says so rather than routing you to a scan. If you find a copy of any of this posted somewhere free that is not one of the sources above, it is almost certainly not authorised.
The one exception is your own shelf. A book you bought is yours to read in whatever form you like, on whatever device you like — that is not what this page is about, and nothing here is a comment on it.