Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged "ideal spot"
where all the "men of the mind" will go after they strike from the world of the moochers
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Her first novel, We the Living (1936), drew on her experiences in the "workers' paradise." Anthem (1938) is a slim dystopian fable set in a future of collectivist stagnation and squalor, in which the word "I" has been banished from the language. The Fountainhead (1943), probably her best-known work, tells the story of an architect embodying Rand's own virtues of determination and independence. Finally, Atlas Shrugged (1957), an apocalyptic utopia, describes the collapse of civilization as the creators, the men of ability, go on strike against the masses.
With Atlas Shrugged, she burned her bridges to the nascent conservative movement: she and the conservatives excommunicated each other. She was an atheist, and conservatives still cling to the old religion; she preached a self-righteous egoism (which hardly seems strange or shocking today, for a generation raised on such notions as "self-esteem" and "self-realization"), while they clung to a religion-grounded altruism.
She went on to articulate the world-view underlying her novels as a philosophical system, which she called "Objectivism"; her associate, Nathaniel Branden, started an enterprise called the "Nathaniel Branden Institute" -- half publishing house, half church -- to provide guidance to her increasingly numerous followers. The Objectivist Newsletter was founded, which under various names and formats continued to provide a forum for her and a few close associates (most other forums being closed to them). Her nonfiction writing, nearly all of it originally published in this journal, occupied the rest of her life. |
