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Atlas Shrugged Still Going Strong at 50

I see that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged turns 50-years old today.

I read it when I was a junior in HS — not as an assigned book, but on my own one summer. I thought it was fantastic and couldn’t put it down. I thought that if only every one in the world could just read this book…

Of course, I also thought that MTV was the pinnacle of human achievement at that timepoint in my life.

I can understand how young kids can still be inspired by and — more accurately — hoodwinked by what has been called Rand’s “sophomoric” style. What I don’t understand is adults who still think this is great literature or great political ideology.

____

The NY Times has reposted their original review of Atlas by Granville Hick.

National Review posts their original review, too. The piece by Whittaker Chambers first appeared in the December 28, 1957, issue of NR:

Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous.

Posted by Robbie Cooper on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 | Trackback |

4 Responses to “Atlas Shrugged Still Going Strong at 50”

Yeah, I’ve wanted to read that and the Fountainhead just for academic reasons but I’ve heard so many horror stories it seems like some bitter medicine to choke down. Yet, I see the Fountainhead is still the #1 book by architecture students at the school near me.

Scary.

I think a similar reassessment is ongoing for On the Road which also is just turning 50.

Left by Preston on September 15th, 2007 at 11:37 am

I read the book when I was in grade school, as I had watched my Dad read it almost every night until he finished it. It was difficult to read, in the sense that the character development, and complexity of her thoughts, were difficult to follow, but not the idea. What if private enterprise had incentive stripped away? Why would they continue to work so hard, to overcome so many problems, to be innovative?
What if the Greek mythological character Atlas saw no reason to hold the earth in space, and just shrugged?
It wasn’t until much later in life, when I learned more about Ms. Rand’s objectivism, intellect, and fierce anti-communism, that I came to understand her message(s) in this book and others.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

— Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness

Left by no2liberals on September 15th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

At least you didn’t have to read White Like Me: Reflections on Race From A Privileged Son.

Left by Nazar on September 15th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

Nazar:

Ever read “Black Like Me”? One of my all-time favorites. As is “On the Road”.

Some other reading recommendations: anything by G.K. Chesterton, one of turn-of-the-century England’s most prominent conservative philosophers, is sure to strike a few chords with most readers of this site.

“What’s Wrong with the World” is pretty straight-up, philosophical essay, while “Napoleon of Notting Hill” and my favorite, “The Man Who Was Thursday”, are fictional narratives.

Check ‘em out.

Left by John Jarzemsky on September 18th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

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