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Read a 1957 review of Ayn Rand’s “excruciatingly awful” Atlas Shrugged .

Today is the sixty-sixth publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s 1100-page magnum opus of unreadable doggerel libertarian science fiction, Atlas Shrugged .

Set in a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations (isn’t it always the way), it’s the story of railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, and their struggle against the “looters” who want to exploit their productivity.

Despite receiving largely negative reviews upon its release, the novel sold briskly and became a formative text for numerous conservative/libertarian ghouls  politicians and thinkers, from Glenn Beck to Ayelet Shaked, Paul Ryan to Clarence Thomas.

One prominent conservative critic of Rand and her philosophy was William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review published this scathing review of the novel by (Communist spy turned HUAC whistleblower turned book critic) Whittaker Chambers in December of ’57.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter .

“The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: ‘Excruciatingly awful.’ I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the ‘looters.’ These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. ‘This,’ she is saying in effect, ‘is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.’

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

“…the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can’t fool little boys and girls with such stuff–not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily. The Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies.

In Atlas Shrugged , all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as ‘looters.’ This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

“So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the dir, over the desolate earth, the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the ‘mysticism of mind’ and the ‘mysticism of muscle’). That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which ‘has resolved personal worth into exchange value,’ ‘has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash-payment.’ The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: ‘And I mean it.’

“ Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism.

“Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held ‘heroic’ in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially–a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

“Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged , a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’

“…we cannot help feeling at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.”

– Whittaker Chambers, The National Review , December 28, 1957

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ATLAS SHRUGGED

by Ayn Rand ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 1957

One finds oneself virtually under an indefinable compulsion to keep reading once caught in the mesh of sheer story telling as Ayn Rand weaves the strands of her fantasy. With one part of reason, one tries to reject the grim horror of the portrait she draws of the final bastion of the once free world falling into a new sort of Dark Ages. The sins of the power magnates are taking their toll. In terror over the threat to their security contained in the ruthless drive of a few leaders of industry, they sell out their initiative, their imagination, their creative powers, their right to independence of thought and action to government, in exchange for imagined security of regulation and strangulation. The thinkers, the creators, the doers, the free spirits fade out of the picture; those who remain label them deserters and traitors. But a few of them, under the leadership of the freest spirits, lay the groundwork for a new social order. Their philosophy has much that will shock the conventional; their oath — "...I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" — seems to contain a negation of the code of humanity. There seems a warped sort of approach to a materialistic touchstone. The insistence on the godlike quality of the leader is never quite carried out in the characterization. In fact, for this reader, most of the characters are unconvincing, overdrawn to represent symbols rather than people. This- for me- was true of The Fountainhead some 14 years ago. Then, too, the machinery of the story was compelling, fascinating; the philosophic content had something faintly phoney; the characters were two dimensional.... Atlas Shrugged holds a terrifying immediacy, if one can envision today's prosperity holding the seeds of tomorrow's decadence. Except in the isolated cases of unrealized potentials of invention, she has tapped few of the now-evident clues to our immediate mechanical future. One finds it difficult to gauge the time span here. The market? Curiosity will be high pressured by the promotion and publicity:- an unheard of advance to the author; a tremendous advertising appropriation; a spirited bidding for subsidiary rights; a predicted advance sale of 60,000 copies out of an initial 75,000 printing... The sheer size of the book — about 1150 pages — is a magnet for an astounding number of readers.... The story is a challenging one; the manner of the telling holds reader interest, despite the unnecessary length; there's enough of sex to provide its mead of shockers; and there is the odd allure of fantasy, a sort of science fiction appeal. And one can count, too, on a goodly number who will discuss the social philosophy with heated arguments, pro and con — plus the intellectual snob appeal of those who like to feel they've plumbed a new code of ethics. It is not a book that leaves one unscathed.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1957

ISBN: 0452011876

Page Count: 1168

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1957

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Ayn Rand

by Ayn Rand adapted by Charles Santino illustrated by Joe Staton

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

ABSOLUTE POWER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1996

The mother of all presidential cover-ups is the centerpiece gimmick in this far-fetched thriller from first-novelist Baldacci, a Washington-based attorney. In the dead of night, while burgling an exurban Virginia mansion, career criminal Luther Whitney is forced to conceal himself in a walk-in closet when Christine Sullivan, the lady of the house, arrives in the bedroom he's ransacking with none other than Alan Richmond, President of the US. Through the one-way mirror, Luther watches the drunken couple engage in a bout of rough sex that gets out of hand, ending only when two Secret Service men respond to the Chief Executive's cries of distress and gun down the letter-opener-wielding Christy. Gloria Russell, Richmond's vaultingly ambitious chief of staff, orders the scene rigged to look like a break-in and departs with the still befuddled President, leaving Christy's corpse to be discovered at another time. Luther makes tracks as well, though not before being spotted on the run by agents from the bodyguard detail. Aware that he's shortened his life expectancy, Luther retains trusted friend Jack Graham, a former public defender, but doesn't tell him the whole story. When Luther's slain before he can be arraigned for Christy's murder, Jack concludes he's the designated fall guy in a major scandal. Meanwhile, little Gloria (together with two Secret Service shooters) hopes to erase all tracks that might lead to the White House. But the late Luther seems to have outsmarted her in advance with recurrent demands for hush money. The body count rises as Gloria's attack dogs and Jack search for the evidence cunning Luther's left to incriminate not only a venal Alan Richmond but his homicidal deputies. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax provides an unsurprising answer to the question of whether a US president can get away with murder. For all its arresting premise, an overblown and tedious tale of capital sins. (Film rights to Castle Rock; Book-of-the-Month selection)

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-446-51996-0

Page Count: 480

Publisher: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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by David Baldacci

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Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’: What the critics had to say in 1957

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“ There are two sides to every issue: One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. ” — Ayn Rand’s hero John Galt speaking in “Atlas Shrugged”

Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” has polarized opinion for more than 50 years. Its fans — including, until recently, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan — applaud the book’s celebration of rugged individualism and no-holds-barred capitalism. Its critics dismiss it as heartless, simplistic and elitist.

In the novel, many of the nation’s most brilliant and innovative entrepreneurs and business leaders have disappeared, leaving the nation in chaos. It turns out they have all departed for “Galt’s Gulch,” a secret and parallel society formed to show an increasingly government-dominated America how much it needs pure capitalism and the men and women who drive it.

In a 2005 speech, Ryan cited Ayn Rand as a key reason he went into politics. He said that he had made “Atlas Shrugged” required reading for his staff, and that he still liked to check his “premises” against passages from the book to be sure “that what I’m believing and doing and advancing are square with the key principles of individualism.” Lately, because Rand didn’t believe in God and because “Atlas Shrugged” celebrates an adulterous relationship between two of its main characters, Ryan has distanced himself from his former remarks, telling the National Review recently, “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy.” These days, he said in the interview, he favors Thomas Aquinas over Rand.

But even with all the controversy about the message of “Atlas Shrugged,” there’s been little discussion of its literary merits. Is it a great book? Here’s what the critics had to say at the time of its publication in fall 1957.

Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times:

It is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand’s equally weighty “The Fountainhead.” Miss Rand writes in the breathless hyperbole of soap opera. Her characters are of billboard size; her situations incredible and illogical; her story is feverishly imaginative. It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.

Granville Hicks, New York Times

Not in any literary sense a serious novel, it is an earnest one, belligerent and unremitting in its earnestness. It howls in the reader’s ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.

Edward Wagenknecht, Chicago Daily Tribune

There is much good sense in this book and it deserves more careful consideration than it is likely to get. For all that, Miss Rand is not quite the Moses to lead us out of the wilderness…. The worst thing in her book is her denunciation of what she calls mysticism, her ideas of which seem derived from Hitler rather than Meister Eckhardt or Rufus Jones. For her a mystic is a parasite in spirit and in matter, “a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others.” No, Miss Rand, a mystic is a man who insists upon using those areas of his mind which you block off.

Helen Beal Woodward, Saturday Review

Miss Rand … throws away her considerable gifts for writing by fixing her reader with a glittering eye and remorselessly impressing upon him her convictions. These range from a hatred of Robin Hood as “the most immoral and the most contemptible” of all human symbols to a belief in a kind of chrome-plated laissez faire. Much of it is persuasive…. But Miss Rand is undone by her prolixity and her incontinence. She sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print, and she cannot refrain from making her points over and over…. Altogether this is a strange, overwrought book.

Gigantic, relentless, often fantastic, this book is definitely not one to be swallowed whole. Throughout its 1,168 pages, Miss Rand never cracks a smile. Conversations deteriorate into monologues as one character after another laboriously declaims his set of values. One speech, the core of the book, spreads across 60 closely written pages. Yet once the reader enters this stark, strange world, he will likely stay with it, borne along by its story and its eloquent flow of ideas.

Paul Jordan-Smith, Los Angeles Times

A neighbor of mine who occasionally reviews books for an eastern magazine dropped in and, seeing the massive volume on my desk, asked what I thought of it. “Challenging and readable and quick with suspense,” I replied…. “a book every businessman should hug to his breast, and the first novel I recall to glorify the dollar mark and the virtue in profit….” But how the shabby little left-wingers are going to hate it!

Donald Malcolm, the New Yorker

Apparently Miss Rand set out to write a novel of social prophecy, something like “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” But while Orwell based his predictions upon the nature of the police state, the lady who gave us “The Fountainhead” has based hers upon — well, it is hard to say. Miss Rand’s villains resemble no one I have ever encountered, and I finally decided to call them “liberals,” chiefly because I can’t imagine whom else she might have in mind. In her vision of the future, then, the liberals have brought the world to a sorry plight. America is plunged into a catastrophic depression, caused by the government’s infernal meddling with the economy, and most of the other nations of the world have become People’s States, whose inhabitants are actually grubbing up roots to keep themselves alive. The last sparks of industrial competence are concentrated in the minds of two dozen — at most — American businessmen, who manage to hold the globe aloft in spite of the best efforts of governments everywhere to bring it down.

Hedda Hopper, in her syndicated column

Ayn Rand, although born in Europe is one of the finest American citizens I know. She worked with John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Adolphe Menjou, Lela Rogers, Charles Coburn and a bunch of us when we formed the Motion Picture Alliance anti-commie group. She’s author of “The Fountainhead,” and has written a blockbuster of a book titled “Atlas Shrugged.” It runs 1,168 pages, and you won’t want to miss one word. I couldn’t put it down, neither will you be able to once you’ve started reading. You’ll say it can’t happen here — but it’s happening every day and we sit still while watching our rights as humans being whittled away.

Whittaker Chambers, National Review

“Atlas Shrugged” can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world…. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

Cary Schneider is library director at The Times. Sue Horton is Op-Ed editor.

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Sue Horton returned to the Los Angeles Times as Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor in December 2018, then moved to a senior editor role before leaving the newsroom in July 2021. For four years before that, she was a Top News editor and West Coast bureau chief at Reuters. She held a variety of editing jobs at the Los Angeles Times between 2001 and 2014, including Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor and deputy California editor. Before her first stint at The Times, she was editor-in-chief of the L.A. Weekly for six years. Prior to that, she was a journalism professor at the University of Southern California. Horton started her journalism career working for Community Information Project, an investigative reporting nonprofit that did stories on contract with public television, “60 Minutes,” and a variety of newspapers and magazines. She is the author of a nonfiction book, “The Billionaire Boys Club,” which was the basis for an NBC miniseries. Horton has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Redlands and a master’s in journalism from USC.

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The Hidden Dominion

A Dissident Enclave

An Insane Read: Atlas Shrugged Book Review by Ayn Rand

September 4, 2018 By Kaisar

What Is Atlas Shrugged?

It is your classic dystopian novel (my favorite genre, if you haven’t caught on by all my other reviews). It highlights a well-functioning, self-sufficient country (USA) that later turns into a collectivist hellhole. IE: dystopia.

It follows the story of Dagny Taggart, as she struggles against “looters” (socialists) that seek to control all businesses and take all of their output in the name of the public good.

As the story progresses, more and more of the prime businessmen and women that created the well-functioning society just give up. In essence, they stop working altogether in protest against the looting.

As the strike continues to escalate, more and more of society collapses. Thus creating the dystopian mess that Ayn Rand depicts so vividly in Atlas Shrugged.

Who Is Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand is a Russian/American author and philosopher that lived through collectivism in the Russian era.

She was a staunch proponent of individualism. So much so, she created the philosophical system known as “Objectivism”. This system purports that reality exists independently of consciousness, that we (humans) have direct contact with reality through logic. In addition, it holds that the highest moral purpose in life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness, within the confines of laissez-faire capitalism. While I do not agree with this mindset, it is still a unique book and a great read.

She also wrote Anthem, which I reviewed here: Anthem by Ayn Rand .

Why Is Atlas Shrugged Such An Interesting Read?

You’ll fall in love with the characters of this book. I rarely relate or care about people in novels, but Atlas Shrugged changed that. Between Dagny, Hank Rearden, Lillian, Eddie, and my personal favorite (Ragnar Danneskjold), there is a certain element of character development that seems sorely lacking compared to most other similar novels.

Ayn Rand wrote the novel in a common style writing, so every piece is highly readable. Which is essential, considering it is 1168 pages long. But don’t let the length scare you, just consider it a book to read for a little here and there. Before you know it, you’ll be hooked and wanting to power through, regardless of page count.

It’s also a novel that is still relevant today. It is particularly relevant with regard to the philosophical debate about collectivism that is present in the Western world. Everything in this book revolves around things such as freedom of speech (and thought), private property , private enterprise, entrepreneurship, and government regulatory oversight.

Then within this broad theme, we have many tidbits of spiritual reflection and even romantic interest.

In short, Atlas Shrugged contains a bit of everything. Moreover, when you figure out why “Atlas Shrugged”, you’ll have a little mind-blown moment from the unexpected twist.

Naturally, I don’t want to give any major plot points away. It would spoil the fun of the novel. But as you read through, pay close attention to the actions of Lillian. She plays background for a long time, but is one of the most interesting characters.

It is hard to imagine a more thought-provoking book that considers government structures and the collectivist nature. You can see a parallel in the modern movements of American society.

In summary, I am thrilled I tackled this mammoth of a text. It taught me a tremendous amount and has easily become one of my top three favorite books.

It’s not likely that this book will suit everyone, I get that. However, for the readers of this website, I’m positive you all would love it if you haven’t read it yet.

Also, you will never be able to look at a train or railroad track the same way again after reading this. So fair warning.

Personal Implications

Atlas Shrugged does require you to take a serious look at yourself and your actions. It is natural while reading through that you’ll contemplate yourself in the characters’ situations, and even begin to see the principles of the text in your everyday life.

It can be a bit of a “lecture” at points. And some people don’t like to be lectured or expand their thoughts outside of their bubble. This book forces that, so I get why some people (especially the socialist-minded) dislike it.

In over 1000+ pages, Ayn Rand teaches you to think with your mind, not your heart. This trait then results in actually being more caring and doing more good than thinking with just your heart.

In Ayn Rand’s perfect society, even teachers and stay at home moms were considered the “atlases” of the world. All it took were the right beliefs and the dedication to their own values to help them reach the peaks of their own happiness.

In short, if you can’t handle looking at your own imperfections and faults, don’t read it. But if you have an open mind and are willing to learn something while enjoying an outstanding storyline, grab a copy.

Atlas Shrugged Final Note on Size

A.S. is an affordable book, especially for the size. I always recommend getting a paperback or hardcover. Mass-market paperbacks are cheaper, but they are hard to read, as the book and text are small.

For a book the size of Atlas Shrugged, it’s best to go with a larger sized edition to make the reading easier.

I say this, but I actually bought the mass-market paperback because it was cheaper. So do whichever suits you.

The main key here is actually reading whichever style you buy.

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• Nov 18, 2020

Review: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Updated: Dec 12, 2022

In 1998, when the Modern Library solicited readers to select the 100 best English language novels published since 1900, Atlas Shrugged finished first place in the voting (Rand also had three other books make the top ten). Interestingly, on the accompanying editor's top 100 list, nary a work by Rand was to be found. What accounts for this disparity? As one literary critic quipped, Ayn Rand may not have more followers than other philosophical novelists, but the ones she does have tend to be fanatical. Here's a critique of Rand's principal novel from a literary, economic, and philosophical perspective.

THE LITERARY PERSPECTIVE

Rand’s story, while entertaining, is excessively long and repetitive, beating the reader over the head with countless monologues that more or less say the same thing. It is littered with false dichotomies, as Rand’s contrived world lacks the infinite nuance and gradation we experience in daily life. To her, things are black or white, rational or irrational, right or wrong. Perhaps there is no better proof of this than in her character typology. Despite the dozens of people we encounter throughout the novel, upon closer examination, there are only two mentionable characters: the hyper-rational, hyper-competent Industrialist (capitalist), and the irrational, blundering - though occasionally cunning - Looter (socialist). While dichotomy can be a well-placed, intentional literary device, Rand takes it to such extremes that it ultimately robs her arguments of their full force, making them seem divorced from reality as we actually encounter it. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a single person in real life who acts, talks, or thinks like either of Rand’s two characters.

THE ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

The 20th century more than vindicated Rand’s endorsement of capitalism (though I’m not sure we’ve ever witnessed the completely unbridled capitalism she would probably espouse). Is capitalism perfect? Of course not. Its “creative destruction” leaves winners and (sometimes significant) losers in its wake – not just business owners either, but plenty of blue-collar workers. Regardless, it is undoubtedly the lesser of many other evils.

It’s hard to know where economic policy ends and personal morality begins with Rand though, as she treats them interchangeably. Her exaggeration of their concomitant nature is a forgivable mistake, as she was trying to refute the viewpoints of the communists and Christian socialists of her time who also inordinately blended morality and economics relative to their typical distinction in American culture. After having watched the Bolsheviks wreck her own country, this must have seemed an urgent project. However, her ultimate argument that Judeo-Christian doctrines of altruism are inimical to, and ultimately fatal toward, Western capitalism is parochial thinking. As shown by Weber, the deeply felt and historically grounded Protestant Work Ethic has been one of the great driving forces in Western economic development. It is itself a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition Rand decries. Her appalling silence toward this undeniable boon of American production betrays her bias against all forms of religiosity – a tendency that is a dogmatic requirement of her philosophy, as will be discussed below.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Having suffered through the Bolshevik Revolution in her formative years, Rand saw one extreme ideology (the marginalization of individual human agency in the name of the collective) and committed the common error of assuming that if it was bad, then its opposite (the valuation of individual agency above all else) must necessarily be good. This is a logician’s trap that would be more forgivable if Rand wasn’t a professed Aristotelian – the philosopher who, among other things, is famous for his doctrine of the Golden Mean as a mechanism to avoid erroneous extremes.

Like so many other modern thinkers, Rand builds her philosophical structure on an incredibly narrow understanding of human nature (Rousseau and the Natural Good, Marx and Homo Economicus, Freud and the Sexual Instinct, et al). We should beware of any philosophy starting with the premise “man is X” where X is an over-exaggeration of one aspect of his character at the expense of all else. Such thinking is fundamentally flawed, typically extolling man as he “should be” while utterly failing to deal with man as he actually is. For Rand, this results in a wild overestimation of man’s rationality and agency, and a near-total denial of his contingency. Her novel’s protagonists are surely superheroes in disguise, unencumbered by death, disease, sickness, or even an ill-timed bowel movement. Is it any wonder this book is so popular with the young, the intelligent, and the enfranchised? What would a poor rice farmer in Indonesia make of this story?

Rand’s explanation of the religious inclination in man is, like Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (from which she borrows heavily), a bizarre reading of history that attributes the success of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to a giant conspiracy theory of “value inversion” in which those who “can’t” (the Clergy, the Looters, the weak) end up subjugating those who “can” (the Rationalists, the Industrialists, the strong) through other-worldly doctrines. While no one should deny that people within all ideological circles – the Church in no way excluded – have at one time or another abused the powers given to them by that ideology, how could thinkers as gifted as Nietzsche and Rand use this fact to cling to such a ridiculous conspiracy theory? The answer is simple: because their dogmatic doctrine of man requires them to. After all, if a person’s essence is rationality (Rand) or self-will (Nietzsche), how did humankind become so enamored with religious ideologies that do not lend preeminence to either of these aspects? They must have been misled by a handful of devious, power-hungry mystics. Why the strong man and the rational man could not stop this conspiracy during its ascendancy, and why we had to wait several thousand years for the book’s messianic savior Jon Galt to save us, is never explained.

Rand inordinately focuses on the Judeo-Christian doctrine of Original Sin as the key pillar in the religious conspiracy theory but completely ignores its complementary and conterminous doctrine of Redemption. Had she not inappropriately isolated Original Sin from its relevant context and schema (in the same way she inappropriately separates man’s rationality/agency from the rest of his character), she would have seen that the wild success of the Judeo-Christian tradition is not because of a conspiracy, but because it gives a more complete and accurate exposition of the problems of man’s existence. Therefore, it is a more psychologically satisfying credo than she comprehends.

What is the doctrine of Original Sin but a recognition of man’s utter contingency? No matter how many railroads a person builds, how much money one makes, or how much one “self-actualizes” through creative expression – despite all this, old age and disease and catastrophe and death are always lurking around the corner, and there is no stopping them. Conversely, the doctrine of Redemption says that despite this contingency, man is still infinitely valuable, he is still divinely endowed, he is still capable of meaningful and lasting productivity in this life and beyond; he is truly transcendent. With even a modicum of reflection, the average man feels this paradoxical tension of his existence – finitude and transcendence – even if he can’t express this tension with the eloquence of a Kierkegaard or a Niebuhr. Luckily he doesn't have to – the Judeo-Christian tradition does it for him, and its ubiquity is accounted for not by a half-baked conspiracy theory as Nietzsche and Rand would have us believe, but by a very real psychological strain it both recognizes and alleviates.

Rand’s notions concerning hard work and individual effort are points well taken. She was enamored with American life, and this novel represents her greatest contribution to a defense of that way of life against what she perceived to be a real threat. For these efforts, I truly commend her.

At the end of the day though, I believe this novel is another modern siren song, luring us in with tempting illusions of self-sufficiency and rational capacity that completely distort and deny the contingency of our nature. If anything, our anxiety over our contingency – no matter how sublimated – often makes us double down on doctrines of self-sufficiency. This helps account for the overwhelming popularity of this book in so many circles. Above all else, what modern man desperately desires is a passionate belief in himself. Rand was the first modern author to give the masses an unabashed doctrine of life-affirming self-sufficiency. But an affirmation of life – no matter how passionate – doesn’t solve the problems of life, and it takes willful ignorance to think any of us ever has been or ever will be self-sufficient. We exist at the mercy of countless factors and forces beyond our comprehension and control. Rand’s deification of reason means the deification of the self, and, like Nietzsche before her, she follows through on the logic that if God is not god, then “man” must step in his place.

Unfortunately, as Goethe once pointed out, there is no “man” – there are only individual men, and they all say different things. I see no reason to accept Rand’s philosophical project as anything other than one more form of fanaticism. She swells up a narrow aspect of reality to unjustified proportions and then tries to convince us to give it preeminence by having it thrash a straw-man. No matter how well-intentioned, that’s what this book amounts to. Throughout the novel, Rand condemns men who aren’t willing to think things through and face the facts clearly. Ironically, I believe this book convicts her of that very sin. An ideology that does not address the problem of man’s finitude and his transcendent freedom has misdiagnosed the disease.

For an in-depth study of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition contra modern ideologies, I highly recommend The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Tyler Tidwell is a retired Marine who lives in the Oklahoma City area with his wife and three children.

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Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

By Harriet Rubin

• Sept. 15, 2007

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand ’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

One of Rand’s most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

Rand’s free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father’s pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, “King of Kings.”

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of “The Fountainhead” began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr. Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Rand called “Atlas” a mystery, “not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder — and rebirth — of man’s spirit.” It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world without them.”

The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of “greed is good.” Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”

Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore’s honor. “As a woman and a Southerner,” she said, “I thrived on Rand’s message that only quality work counted, not who you are.”

Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas” at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.” He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he said, “that excellence should be your goal.”

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand’s ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.

Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Mr. Stack says, he took action like a hero out of “Atlas.” He created an “open book” company in which employees were transparently working in their own interest.

Mr. Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Mr. Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Mr. Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in “Atlas”: people guided by reason and self-interest.

“There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out,” Mr. Stack said. “You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity.” He said he defied them. “ ‘Atlas’ helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC.”

Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. “It’s the best business book I ever read,” he said. “I didn’t do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that’s an eye opener.”

Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.”

Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.

In Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software for supply chain companies like Tastykake. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

“We were reading the book,” she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. “For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people. John Galt took all the great minds and started a new society.

“Some of our customers don’t know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book,” she went on. “Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ”

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• About the Book

Atlas Shrugged (1957) is a mystery story, Ayn Rand once commented, "not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder—and rebirth—of man’s spirit." It is the story of a man—the novel’s hero—who says that he will stop the motor of the world, and does. The deterioration of the U.S. accelerates as the story progresses. Factories, farms, shops shut down or go bankrupt in ever larger numbers. Riots break out as food supplies become scarce. Is he, then, a destroyer or the greatest of liberators? Why does he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies but against those who need him most, including the woman, Dagny Taggart, a top railroad executive, whom he passionately loves? What is the world’s motor—and the motive power of every man?

Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, and charged with awesome questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is a novel of tremendous scope. It presents an astounding panorama of human life—from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy (Francisco d’Anconia)—to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction (Hank Rearden)—to the philosopher who becomes a pirate (Ragnar Danneskjold)—to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph (Richard Halley). Dramatizing AR’s complete philosophy, Atlas Shrugged is an intellectual revolution told in the form of an action thriller of violent events—and with a ruthlessly brilliant plot and irresistible suspense.

We do not want to spoil the plot by giving away its secret or its deeper meaning, so as a hint only we will quote here one brief exchange from the novel:

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?"

"I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

• Publication Date: September 1, 1996
• Mass Market Paperback: 1088 pages
• Publisher: Signet
• ISBN-10: 0451191145
• ISBN-13: 9780451191144

The ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Reviews

How did literary critics react to Atlas Shrugged ?

With the publication of Atlas Shrugged , Ayn Rand’s world changed. The novel established her as the foremost philosophic defender of capitalism. But she was no longer met with the polite and often positive reaction that greeted publication of We the Living , Anthem , and The Fountainhead. 1 The response to Atlas Shrugged was principally negative and often vicious—making her infamous in some circles and a controversial figure for the rest of her life.

The reason for this change is not difficult to discern. We the Living (1936) was a political novel involving a love triangle. Anthem (1937, revised in 1946) was a short, poetic novella that projected a future society without the word “I.” And The Fountainhead (1943) dramatized the virtue of independence, as it followed the story of an architect battling the Establishment. But with Atlas Shrugged , the themes were no longer so limited nor was the philosophy even slightly implicit. By 1957, Ayn Rand had become an uncompromising advocate of reason, egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism, and an uncompromising opponent of altruism, collectivism, and mysticism (including religion). With her three previous works, there may have been some doubts about where she stood philosophically; with Atlas Shrugged , there could be no doubts. It had become much more difficult for critics (and readers) to ignore or evade her ideas.

The changed attitude towards Ayn Rand was reflected in the reviews of her novels. We the Living received mixed but generally positive reviews, somewhat surprising given its anti-Soviet message and that it was published during the Red Decade. Anthem ’s paean against collectivism was welcomed even in socialist England. The Fountainhead evoked some nascent philosophic opposition, but most critics ignored the theme of “individualism vs. collectivism, not in politics but in a man’s soul” and treated the novel as a love story, a book about architecture, or—at most—an attack on conformity.

The Atlas Shrugged reviews constitute a microcosm of American intellectual life: the Left was appalled by its blatant pro-capitalism; the religious Right rebelled against its rejection of religion. Most reviewers were dismayed by its immoderation, that is, its absolutism, and horrified by its opposition to altruism. Thus were revealed the principal intellectual trends against which Ayn Rand would fight the rest of her life.

A SURVEY OF THE REVIEWS

Let us now look in some detail at the Atlas Shrugged reviews. Of the hundred reviews in Ayn Rand’s personal files, about half were in folders she marked as “Junk,” “Mixed,” or “Medium.” 2 The other half were in general files and contained mostly negative reviews. Only fourteen (found mainly in “Mixed” and “Medium”) were basically positive, and that number drops when only major publications are included. However, Atlas Shrugged did get some positive reaction from the majors. Paul Jordan Smith, writing in the Los Angeles Times , correctly identified the philosophy, about which he was completely approving, calling the book “challenging” and “fascinating,” and he was sure that left-wingers would hate it. The Wall Street Journal published a review by M. E. Davis (October 10, 1957) that was positive though weak, especially given that Ayn Rand was championing the businessman. Davis wrote that the novel favors selfishness and individualism, is a tense and gripping story, and—though he makes little mention of the ideas—he concluded by pointing out that Ayn Rand provides a bright future at the end by having a character add “freedom of trade and production” to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. There were positive reviews in the Boston Herald (October 13) by Alice Dixon Bond, who called it “monumental,” and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Berne Jacobson, who deemed it a book “for those who feel that man is a thinking animal and has a right to the products of his mind.” Other positive reviews appeared in San Francisco (Alma Oberst, October 19 in the News ), Fort Worth (Thelma Cash, October 27 in the Star-Telegram ) and some smaller cities. The most positive review in a national magazine came from Playboy , which described the theme rather imprecisely as: those who believe in reality believe in themselves and live for themselves. Newsweek began its review by quoting Ayn Rand on her “philosophy in essence” 3 and proceeded through a non-sneering description of the plot and the philosophy. “Despite laborious monologues, the reader will stay with this strange world, borne along by its story and eloquent flow of ideas.” In sum, said Newsweek : “Powerful argument.” (And Newsweek followed with a respectful interview with Ayn Rand.)

For more significant reviews, let us turn to those from what might be termed the “liberal establishment.”

Earle P. Browne in the Washington Post and Times-Herald (October 13) alleged that “her industrialists are so ruthless they make Hollywood’s worst producers seem like Bernard Baruch,” and the book’s major weakness, he wrote, was its neglect of the ordinary individual. Miss Rand, wrote Browne, seems to believe that to be a “heroic being” and fight oppression, you have to be the inventor of a new metal, the girl vice-president of a railroad, or the creator of a motor which harnesses energy from the sun. The Washington Star , in a review by Mary McGrory (October 13) labeled “junk” by Ayn Rand, called the book preposterous and endless, with no charm, humor, or nuances of character; a paean to survival of the fittest written like a battering ram. Another “junk” review appeared in the Christian Science Monitor (October 13) by Ruth Chapin Blackman, who maintained that the novel does its own purpose a disservice through caricature. There was, the reviewer lamented in a paradigm of nonconceptual analysis, no relevance to the book because, she wrote, the American economy is booming; furthermore, the novel is full of extremes and absolutes, with no middle ground or compromise; in fact, Blackman claims, had Rearden et al. exercised their political responsibility, they wouldn’t have been taken over.

The reviews in New York City—which Ayn Rand thought to be the only important reviews for any book—were mostly negative. The New York Times Book Review (October 13), selected by then ex-Communist Party member Granville Hicks as its reviewer. Hicks, in fact, had been an editor at Macmillan in 1936 and, according to Ayn Rand, 4 had tried unsuccessfully to prevent Macmillan from publishing We the Living. Hicks called Atlas Shrugged a harangue and not a serious novel. He made fun of having heroes and villains and attacked the novel for being a tribute to the superior individual. The book, he concluded, was written out of hate, a conclusion whose sole basis was that it was set in a dying New York City. An unlikely plot, wrote New York Post reviewer W. G. Rogers (October 13), who would rather have read four shorter novels of the same total length. The novel, he said, is preposterous and endless, praises cutthroat competition, and lacks charm and humor. The review in The New Yorker , by Donald Malcolm (October 26), was predictably snide. It called the theme unbelievable and pointless. “After all,” wrote Malcolm, “to warn contemporary America against abandoning its factories, neglecting technological progress and abolishing the profit motive seems a little like admonishing water against running uphill.” (He obviously didn’t foresee the ecology/environmentalism movement, which Ayn Rand termed “the anti-industrial revolution.” 5 ) Time magazine (October 14) began: “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman in the comic strip or Nietzschean version? The reader can’t be sure. Then the truth emerges: Ayn Rand is smashing the world in order to rebuild it according to her own philosophy. And that philosophy must be read to be believed.” After making fun of the story and Ayn Rand’s writing, Time asserted that her philosophy is merely Nietzsche’s inversion of Christianity and is ludicrously naïve. In fact, opined Time , her version of capitalism is such a hideous caricature that it will destroy faith in capitalism. Charles Rolo, in the Atlantic Monthly (November) said that Atlas Shrugged might be mildly described as execrable claptrap. In a typical distortion, he claimed that Ayn Rand is a Nietzschean and “holds that egoism can be deduced from A is A. Makes our most reactionary journals sound like do-gooders.” Atlas Shrugged , he wrote, is an extreme expression of the aggressiveness and power worship which have been the Black Death of this century (a none-too-subtle way of calling Ayn Rand a Nazi).

In the Saturday Review of Literature , H. B. Woodward (October 12) called Ayn Rand a writer of “dazzling virtuosity” and Atlas Shrugged the equivalent of a fifteenth-century morality play which challenges the welfare state and the whole Christian ethic. However, Woodward thought the book to be over-simplified with its good guys and bad guys, had too much philosophy, demolished straw men and was shot through with hatred: of moralists, mystics, income taxes, professors, altruists, Communism, and Christianity. Demonstrating a certain inability to identify abstract principles, Woodward concluded that Ayn Rand’s solution is the same as that of nineteenth-century altruists: a small, controlled Utopia. E. Nelson Hayes, writing in the Progressive , the journal of the Humanist Society (November), attacked selfishness, equated heroes with superheroes and referred to Aristotelian logic as “the blind almost mystical belief in either-or and in absolutes and the unreality of contradictions.” In fact, he maintained, man has survived because of his power to love and has produced because of his ability to cooperate.

Ayn Rand’s uncompromising support of capitalism and its foundations had elicited predictable opposition from the liberal establishment. But what might seem surprising was the level and depth of opposition from Ayn Rand’s supposed allies on the political right. So let us look at those reviews and then assess their significance.

Catholic publications, such as The Sign and The Tablet , were scandalized by her abandonment of God and belief that we have a right to exist for ourselves. Patricia Donegan in Commonweal (November 8) complained about the opposition to Original Sin and the lack of compassion, charity, and humility. Another Catholic reviewer, Francis E. O’Gorman, in the Catholic Telegraph Register (November 22), branded it “the most immoral and destructive book he’d ever read,” but was mollif i ed that its 500,000 words would not endure. 9 And Riley Hughes, in Catholic World (January 1958), opined that Rand subscribed not to reason but to rationalism, or why else would she sneer at anything mystical. But these reviews were mild, compared to the harshest attack on Atlas Shrugged.

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS’S REVIEW IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW

It is significant that the National Review wanted (and wants) to go on record as seeing no redeeming value in what has become a classic and a favorite novel of so many Americans, from businessmen to Hollywood stars. 12 But even more significant is Chambers’ attack on Ayn Rand’s ideas. His criticisms show how intent the National Review was (and is) to distance itself from Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

Chambers advanced the claim—popular mainly with the Left—that Ayn Rand is a Nietzschean, with political views leading to Nazism. “Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging (sic) debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche’s ‘last men.’” These supermen heroes are, according to Chambers, a “technocratic elite,” who will “head us into dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be).” “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged ,” he charges, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” What are we to make of these charges? For one thing, it is impossible to take Chambers as an honest critic: he charges her with ideas (e.g., that some people are “beyond good and evil”) that she went to great lengths to denounce (both dramatically and in Galt’s Speech), so it seems as though Chambers’ hatred of the book is beyond fact. But let us look briefly at some specifics. Is Ayn Rand’s philosophy Nietzschean? It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explain why the answer is “no.” Suffice to say that—although, as a teenager in Soviet Russia, she was temporarily attracted to Nietzsche’s poetic paean to the individual—she soon realized that his philosophy was antithetical to hers, particularly his opposition to reason and his advocacy of determinism and of power over other people. “You are wrong,” she would write later to a fan, “when you see any parallel between my philosophy and Nietzsche’s.” 13 As to her views on dictatorship (and its philosophical antecedents), those views were too well-established even in 1957 to necessitate any refutation of Chambers’ claim. Her novella Anthem , published in 1937, established her credentials as anticollectivist, and in 1942, Mussolini’s fascist government banned the Italian film of We the Living when the government realized that Rand was attacking collectivism per se, not merely Soviet Communism. By 1957, Ayn Rand was even more established as a champion of reason and individual rights, placing her in the tradition of the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence. One might think that such ideas would endear her to the political Right—until one realizes that those ideas are precisely what the National Review conservatives oppose, as is evidenced by Chambers’ other criticisms of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand’s approach to ethics is not to Chambers’ liking, because “everybody [in Atlas Shrugged ] is either all good or all bad.” Of course, perhaps employing some dialectical logic from his past, he also claimed that her heroes were presented as being “ beyond [my italics] good and evil.” Nevertheless, he is obviously opposed to Rand’s moral absolutism. He is also unsympathetic to her individualism, because it leaves “no other nexus between man and man other than naked self-interest,” a view he claims allies her with Marxism, although his criticism is almost identical to that leveled by Marx against individualism: “The concern of the French Constitution of 1793,” wrote Marx, “is with the freedom of man as an isolated monad withdrawing into itself. . . . The human right of freedom is not based on the connection of man with man but rather on the separation of man from man. It is this right of separation, the right of the limited individual, limited unto himself.” 14 Beyond his sneers at “naked self-interest” and his attempt to turn her ethics upside down by characterizing it as promoting a technocratic elite, Chambers makes no mention of her opposition to altruism or her insight that altruism is the ethical basis of dictatorship.

The actual theme of Atlas Shrugged , one that is obvious in virtually every page, is the role of the mind in human existence. Ayn Rand’s message is: human existence and progress depend on the mind, that is, the independent thinking of those who choose to think. Marx’s materialism, which Chambers believes Ayn Rand accepts, is in direct contradiction to the message of Atlas Shrugged. The materialist (or labor) theory of value, a cornerstone of Marxism, is the direct opposite of Ayn Rand’s views on production: the pages of Atlas Shrugged are replete with the message that it is ideas and intellectual labor—not physical labor—that move the world.

Four years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged , Ayn Rand presented—at Princeton University—a lecture entitled “Conservatism: An Obituary.” In this, and many subsequent talks and essays, she argued that no matter how philosophically bad was the Left, the conservatives were worse, because they attempted to justify freedom and capitalism on faith and altruism, views that undermined capitalism rather than supported it. Freedom, she argued, is impossible on any philosophy that holds an individual to be moral only if he lives for others. On that ethical view, his life would belong to others, that is he would be a slave.

Intellectually, to rest one’s case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies—that one has no rational arguments to offer. The “conservatives” claim that their case rests on faith, means that there are no rational arguments to support the American system [that they’re supposedly defending], no rational justification for freedom, justice, property, individual rights, that these rest on a mystic revelation and can be accepted only on faith —that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but men must hold faith as superior to reason. 27

Ayn Rand did not expect much from reviews of her books. As she stated in her biographical interviews, “I had read too many book reviews of books that I had read, and I had seen the terrible contradictions, [with] no standards nor reasons given.” Nor did she blame herself for bad reviews: “If anybody praises me I want to know why. And, particularly, if anybody criticizes me I want to know why. And if I see arbitrary statements, I discount them immediately, particularly if they’re distorting statements.” Nevertheless, the reviews of Atlas Shrugged had an important effect on Ayn Rand: they helped convince her of the urgent need to spread her philosophy.

The worst part for me of the after -Atlas period, was the fact that I could not make up my mind am I a fiction writer or am I a philosopher. Or rather, I knew that I was both, and neither prospect alone quite appealed to me. I did not know what I wanted to undertake next. I was enormously shocked by the state of the culture and by the attacks on Atlas , not by the attacks themselves, but by the fact that there was nobody to oppose them. I had expected more intelligent smears. Actually in the thirties, reviewers and columnists and everybody else was on a higher intellectual level. I had predicted the smears to some extent. I had told Random House not to count on a single good review; if they got one it’s possible, but that would be gravy. But what shocked me was the abysmal, stupid, hooliganism of the reviews, that they were self-contradictory even within their own terms. Total distortions, and that there was nobody objecting to it. That the whole state of the culture suddenly appeared much worse than I had imagined. 28

She was not willing to concede the battle to her philosophic enemies, to let them be the only ones speaking about the philosophy of Atlas Shrugged. And when she was convinced by Leonard Peikoff and others that her philosophy was not only more unique than she realized but wasn’t as self-evident to others as it was to herself, she resolved to explain the details of that philosophy, which she did in lectures, essays, and books for the next twenty-five years.

Image credit: Alice Dixon Bond’s review of Atlas Shrugged in the Boston Sunday Herald, October 13, 1957. © Boston Sunday Herald (Ayn Rand Archives).

Reprinted from the English Language edition of Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” edited by Robert Mayhew and originally published by Lexington Books, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., Lanham, MD, USA. Copyright © by the author. Published in the English language by arrangement with Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reprinting, or on any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Do you have a comment or question?

• See my other essays on the reviews of Ayn Rand’s novels: “Reviews of We the Living,” in Robert Mayhew, ed., Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004); “Reviews of Anthem,” in Robert Mayhew, ed., Essays on Ayn Rand’s Anthem (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005); “The Fountainhead Reviews,” in Robert Mayhew, ed., Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007).
• All reviews quoted herein are from Ayn Rand’s collection in the Ayn Rand Papers, located in the Ayn Rand Archives, Irvine, Calif.
• See the “About the Author” afterword to Atlas Shrugged.
• In her Biographical Interviews (Ayn Rand Archives).
• See “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” in Ayn Rand, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution , Peter Schwartz, ed. (New York: Meridian, 1999).
• Ayn Rand noted that she “always thought of [Harold] Laski and Fadiman as the main sources [of Ellsworth Toohey]. . . . Well [Fadiman] was the arch literateur of the Left. In other words, the intellectual who had enormous influence in Leftist circles and was kind of an elegant literary type. Enormously phony. . . . And it was that intellectual superciliousness of his, combined with Leftism, that was just right for Toohey.” Biographical Interviews (Ayn Rand Archives).
• As a consequence of that review and a shorter one he wrote in Holiday magazine, under the heading “Current Books I’ve Liked,” Miss Rand—as she related in the same interviews—“sort of lifted him a few rungs in hell.” Biographical Interviews (Ayn Rand Archives).
• E. Merrill Root, “What About Ayn Rand,” National Review , June 30, 1960, quoted in George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006), 240.
• Similarly, in a classic case of wishful thinking, William F. Buckley began his obituary of Ayn Rand with: “Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn” ( National Review , April 2, 1982). Note that more than fifty  years after publication it still sells more than 130,000 copies per year.
• Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” National Review , December 28, 1957.
• Peikoff’s letter is published for the first time in this volume. See chapt e r 8 .
• A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress found Atlas Shrugged to be second in influence only to the Bible.
• Ayn Rand, letter to Libby Parker, in Michael S. Berliner, ed., Letters of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton), 614.
• Karl Marx, from “On the Jewish Question,” quoted in Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Praeger, 1962), 64.
• Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1952), 6.
• Chambers, Witness , 15
• Chambers, Witness , 16.
• Karl Marx, Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” in Eugene Kamenka, ed., The Portable Karl Marx (New York: Viking Penguin, 1983), 160.
• See Atlas Shrugged (933). For a discussion of Rand’s position, see Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991), 4ff.
• Chambers, Witness , 9.
• Chambers, Witness , 13.
• M. Stanton Evans, in his 1967 critique of Ayn Rand in The National Review lamented that she tried to justify capitalism without its supposedly necessary base, that is “the Christian culture which has given birth to all our freedoms.” M. Stanton Evans, “The Gospel According to Ayn Rand,” National Review , October 3, 1967, quoted in Nash, 541.
• Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program” in Kamenka, ed., Portable Karl Marx , 541. “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44–45) “Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.” (Acts 4:34–35)
• Ayn Rand, letter to Stephen Sipos, in Berliner, Letters of Ayn Rand , 565. For the similarities in the two supposedly opposed views, see Leonard Peikoff, “Religion vs. America,” in Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason (New York: New American Library, 1989), 76–77.
• Gary Wills, as part of National Review ’s ongoing angst over Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged , echoed this tragic view of man: “When [John] Galt asserts the immediate perfectibility of man . . . he is working from the first principle of historical Liberalism,” in contrast to conservatism. Gary Wills, “But Is Ayn Rand Conservative?” National Review , February 27, 1960, quoted in Nash, 241.
• Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You.”
• Ayn Rand, “Conservatism: An Obituary,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967), 197. Rand could have had Chambers in mind, for he wrote in Witness : “[God] is the only guarantor of freedom,” and political freedom “is only a political reading of the Bible” (16).
• Bibliographical Interviews (Ayn Rand Archives).

Michael S. Berliner

Michael S. Berliner, founding CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute, is the editor of Letters of Ayn Rand and senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives.

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"Excruciatingly awful": On Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

Strong opinions from the national review.

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Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.

That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter .

“The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: ‘Excruciatingly awful.’ I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the ‘looters.’ These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. ‘This,’ she is saying in effect, ‘is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.’

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

“…the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can’t fool little boys and girls with such stuff–not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily. The Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies.

In Atlas Shrugged , all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as ‘looters.’ This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

“So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the dir, over the desolate earth, the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the ‘mysticism of mind’ and the ‘mysticism of muscle’). That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which ‘has resolved personal worth into exchange value,’ ‘has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash-payment.”‘ The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: ‘And I mean it.’

“Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism.

“Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held ‘heroic’ in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially–a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

“Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged , a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’

“…we cannot help feeling at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.”

– Whittaker Chambers, The National Review , December 28, 1957

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Atlas Shrugged

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• Libertarianism.org - How Influential is Atlas Shrugged?
• AynRand.org - Atlas Shrugged
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Atlas Shrugged , novel by Ayn Rand , published in 1957. The book’s female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures and restrictions of massive bureaucracy . Her antagonistic reaction to a libertarian group seeking an end to government regulation is later echoed and modified in her encounter with a utopian community , Galt’s Gulch, whose members regard self-determination rather than collective responsibility as the highest ideal. The novel contains the most complete presentation of Rand’s personal philosophy, known as objectivism , in fictional form.

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Atlas Shrugged Paperback – September 1, 1996

• Print length 1088 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Signet
• Publication date September 1, 1996
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 7.76 x 5.08 x 2.53 inches
• ISBN-10 9780451191144
• ISBN-13 978-0451191144
• Lexile measure 990L
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0451191145
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Signet (September 1, 1996)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1088 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780451191144
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0451191144
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 990L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.61 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.76 x 5.08 x 2.53 inches
• #38 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #117 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #304 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936, followed by Anthem. With the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, she achieved spectacular and enduring success. Rand's unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience and maintains a lasting influence on popular thought. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in such books as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, and The Romantic Manifesto. Ayn Rand died in 1982.

(Image reproduced courtesy of The Ayn Rand® Institute)

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Customers find the writing style praiseworthy, natural, and gripping. They also describe the intellectual quality as enlightening, uplifting, and excellent. Readers also mention the capitalism as excellent and the power of capitalism. However, some find the pacing very slow in the beginning and middle. Opinions are mixed on the characterization, length, readability, and plot. Some find the characters wonderfully developed, while others say they seem pretty dour. Reader opinions are mixed also on the plot, with some finding it compelling and true, while other find it weird and serves no constructive purpose.

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Customers find the book enlightening, intelligent, and a must-read for our times. They also say the implications are simultaneously universal, prophetic, and weave an excellent mystery surrounding the enigmatic John Galt. Readers also say it's an emotional tale of tragedy and joy that makes them cry and cheer.

"...She’s tough, competent, decisive and hard-working. But there is a tremendous amount of melodrama attached, not only to her, but to all of them...." Read more

"... It's refreshing , in fact, to have a book so hell-bent on its ideas and narrative without a hint of shades of gray, without any patience for human..." Read more

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Customers find the writing style praiseworthy, hard-working, and gripping. They also say the characters are developed well and interesting to see progress through. Readers also say it's a great story, a solid defense of capitalism, and a rebuke of socialism.

"...She’s tough, competent, decisive and hard-working . But there is a tremendous amount of melodrama attached, not only to her, but to all of them...." Read more

"...But it was worth it!I enjoy the forcefulness and certainty of Rand's writing, and the sheer scale of this book with its many characters..." Read more

"...I respect Rand for writing a very strong and praiseworthy female character fully in charge of her mind and body...." Read more

"...The product collapsed within a couple of months ...." Read more

Customers find the book an excellent description of the power of capitalism and the dangers of systems. They also say the libertarian idea is good, and the entrepreneurial American spirit is strong. Readers also mention that the book is the perfect counter to Marx's capital.

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Customers are mixed about the readability. Some find the book wonderful, honest, and refreshing. They also say the reader on Audible is great, clear, and easily understood. However, others say it's not an easy read, overtly didactic, and repetitive. They say the plot devices and dialog are simple and repetitive, making it hard work to get through.

"...much time to what turn out to be minor characters, it is overtly didactic in the extreme , the plot devices and revelations are extremely easy to..." Read more

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"...'s philosophy, I agree with those who say that she's not a particularly consequential thinker ...." Read more

"...But it was worth it!I enjoy the forcefulness and certainty of Rand's writing , and the sheer scale of this book with its many characters..." Read more

Customers find the plot compelling, entertaining, and thought-provoking. They also say the premise is scary. However, some readers find the black-and-white bold stroke style cripples the storytelling, and the occasional long philosophical screeds distracting. They describe the book as overblown, barely readable, and a philosophical fantasy.

"...But there is a tremendous amount of melodrama attached , not only to her, but to all of them...." Read more

"...Atlas Shrugged 3 stars for its overall quality as a serious and compelling novel ...." Read more

"...Utterly incompetent, idiotic , corrupt, lazy and possesses the reasoning skills of a drunk..." Read more

"...The narrative is divided somewhat arbitrarily into what I came to think of as two parts, which seemed to have little to do with each other...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the length of the book. Some mention that it's long and worthwhile, while others say that it’s really long and sometimes has unbearably long-winded dialogues.

"This book is way too long , even by standards of 60 years ago when people had longer attention spans and fewer electronic distractions...." Read more

"...the forcefulness and certainty of Rand's writing, and the sheer scale of this book with its many characters and big ideas...." Read more

"...First is its prodigious length -- the 35th anniversary paperback edition is 1,074 small-type pages...." Read more

"...Because the book is so long , some of the characters developed really well, and grew, others were exactly the way they were portrayed at first and..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the characterization. Some mention the book has wonderfully developed characters, while others say the characters seem pretty dour.

"...Because the book is so long, some of the characters developed really well , and grew, others were exactly the way they were portrayed at first and..." Read more

"...The characters are real, with heros that have very real flaws and villians that you actually want to pull out of the book to give a good thrashing..." Read more

"...While this could potentially happen it seems very odd behavior for a believable character and almost made me laugh out loud...." Read more

"...enough to pull me through the verbose sections, the heroic characters are draw in enough detail , with motives and lifes of great interest and..." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book very slow in the beginning and middle. They also say the characters move slowly and the book drags in parts.

"...It takes too long at the beginning to involve the reader in the central conflict or in what turn out to be the main characters...." Read more

"...This took me a long time to read as it was so laboriously slow in spots . However, I am glad I did. It is an impressive piece of literature...." Read more

"...sentence structure and grammar and such is ok, I guess, but the pacing is pathetic ...." Read more

"...However, it is VERY slow to start ; in fact, I would have rated it as a 3 if not for that I suspect most people who are buying it already know what..." Read more

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