From his review of Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (which, amusingly, also mentions Mickey Spillane):

Rand’s taste in literature and the other arts is an obstacle when it comes to accepting her as a world-class intellectual, as this film clearly does: she revered others besides Aristotle, Victor Hugo, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Fritz Lang of Siegfried and Metropolis. Paxton’s film alludes to Rand’s touching celebration of the utopian spirit of Marilyn Monroe, offered shortly after the actress’s death, but it excludes her appalling defense of the early novels of Mickey Spillane and his hero Mike Hammer as models worthy of emulation. (Spillane eventually became Rand’s friend, and she wrote with admiration in The Romantic Manifesto that “he gives me the feeling of hearing a military band in a public park” — one indication of her musical taste, which mainly ran to what she called “tiddlywink music” from the turn of the century.) Page through the index of the recently published Letters of Ayn Rand in search of the giants of literary modernism, and you find most of them are absent — although she does link James Joyce to the “beatniks” as an example of the sort of junk that’s “admired in English courses.” And Gertrude Stein? “She is being published, discussed and given more publicity than any real writer. Why? There’s no financial profit in it. Just as a joke? I don’t think so. It is done — in the main probably quite subconsciously to destroy the mind in literature.” Whose, one wonders? Statements like this make Rand seem less like an intellectual of any class and more like someone who, like R.L. Stine’s literary creation Slappy the Dummy, has a moldy sandwich where their brain should be. The comparison is especially apt when one considers that R.L. Stine is among the few contemporary writers who can truly claim to be working in the tradition of Gertrude Stein.