Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged was Rand’s fourth and last work and her longest and one she regarded as her most outstanding achievement in fiction writing.
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged is a science fiction novel with elements of mystery and romance and Rand’s most comprehensive presentation of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction. “The function of man’s intellect in existence,” as Rand put it, is the central topic of Atlas Shrugged. In addition, the book delves into a variety of philosophical issues that Rand would later expand into Objectivism.
The novel envisions a dystopian America in which private companies are subjected to ever-increasing rules and restrictions. Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive, and her lover, steel mogul Hank Rearden, fight “looters” who seek to take advantage of their production. Dagny and Hank learn that a mysterious man known only as John Galt pushes other business executives to quit their firms and vanish as a strike of productive people against the looters. The strikers intend to establish a new capitalist society based on Galt’s ideology of reason and individuality towards the novel’s end.
After its 1957 release, Atlas Shrugged got primarily unfavorable reviews, yet the book enjoyed enduring popularity and sales for decades. A film trilogy based on the novel was released from 2011 to 2014 after numerous failed efforts to adapt it for cinema or television. The book has also gained traction among conservative and libertarian intellectuals and politicians.
Anne Heller, Rand’s biographer, traces the inspiration for Atlas Shrugged back to a novel Rand envisioned as a freshman at the University of Petrograd long before she arrived in America. That novel, for which Rand drew out a comprehensive plot but never finished, was set in the future when all of Europe had turned communist. The most talented Europeans are being enticed to America by a gorgeous, passionate American heiress, undermining the European communist dictatorship. Following a series of intricate narrative twists, the heiress seduces a French communist sent to America to stop her, and the two embark on a tumultuous romance.
This article is curated by Prittle Prattle News.
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