It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that Ayn Rand’s magnum opus has had a more material effect on America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries than any other novel. In literary circles, the work generally has elicited smirks and howls, but it has spoken revelation, if not truth, to power and its brokers. The book’s pointed, merit-based reordering of conventional morality has inspired free-market champions and the technocratic elite, trickling down to straighten the intellectual posture of even ambitious politicians. Rand wrote it as a manifesto of her philosophy, which she called Objectivism and which, at its core, asserts that egoism is—and must be—the true measure of morality. Rand, a White Russian who emigrated from Saint Petersburg to New York in 1926, venerated the successful and spoke of the poor as “takers” and, more chillingly, “refuse.” When she died, a six-foot-tall floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was propped up next to her coffin, in—spoiler alert!—a poignant evocation of the last line of Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn Rand's heroes are essentially the same person, but it is refreshing to have a truely competent and self-assured protagonist. Well worth a read. ..And, who is John Galt?
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