"Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again."
Posted on 03/14/2015 8:04:26 PM PDT by don-o
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a previous letter:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
The letter, which you can read online or find in the book The Habit of Being, then turns to other matters.
O’Connor’s critical appraisal of Ayn Rand’s books is pretty straightforward. But here’s one factoid worth knowing. Mickey Spillane (referenced in O’Connor’s letter) was a hugely popular mystery writer, who sold some 225 million books during his lifetime. According to his Washington Post obit, “his specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers.” Critics, appalled by the sex and violence in his books, dismissed his writing. But Ayn Rand defended him. In public, she said that Spillane was underrated. In her book The Romantic Manifesto, Rand put Spillane in some unexpected company when she wrote: “[Victor] Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral–Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide–Spillane gives me the feeling of listening to a military band in a public park–Tolstoy gives me the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter.” All of which goes to show that Ayn Rand’s literary taste was no better than her literature.
Thomistic Philosophy is a great introduction to Aristotelian philosophy. This handful of pages is worth more than a modern college education, since it deals with first principles.
Why bother sifting through Ayn Rand’s tiresome novels for ideas when you can simply read Ragnar Redbeard and have them laid out for you in the original form?
I think her best novel was We the Living. Afterwards, she went overboard in “spelling it out.” Even then I didn’t quite “get it” until I read The Virtue of Selfishness. Then everything fell into place and all of her fiction made much more sense.
I just got done reading “Call of the Wild” by Jack London.
"Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again."
How many books did Flannery O’Connor sell?
How many books did Ayn Rand sell?
Let the consumer judge which is a better messenger.
Sense of life is set in childhood. It determines whether you love or hate one work of art or another. I love Ayn Rand’s fiction. Her novel The Fountainhead changed my life. Atlas got me going. The Comprachicos at the end of the New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution gave me an understanding of why my education crippled my rational faculty and the drive not to let them claim one more progressive education victim. That was 40 years ago. I’ve been happy philosophically ever since. When she was alive, I knew her personally and found she could take the current state of the world and make sense of it in a way no one could. It was a rare honor to have known a genius. They come along infrequently in history. Like her or hate her, she was an original thinker, astonishing to watch in her living room or lecture hall. I grew to love her. Thus, when people want to engage in arguments with me about her, I don’t answer. She needs no defense, her works are her defense.
Flannery O’Connor is far superior to Ayn Rand. Her fiction has the depth that comes from the accurate understanding of the fallen nature of her characters and their need of redemption. Rand’s work remains on the shallower level because without the proper understanding of human nature that comes with understanding Christianity, it is going to miss the mark.
“..let the consumer judge...”
No way! The “consumer” is the majority and the average American IQ is around 100. Sad, but true. OK - so Ayn Rand’s fans clearly have higher IQ’s than that, however Flannery O’Connor’s work is more complex, so the basic point holds true.
We have Obama in the White House based on the premise that the majority knows what they are doing.
bump
You know Tolstoy use to write in the village square. The faces inspired him.
Ha.
One of my favorite books.
She would have done well to partner with another writer who could have hung better stories on Rand's ideas. Rand claimed that her ideas could be better expressed in fiction than in a long diatribe. However, if you are gonna let characters spout on and on for multiple pages, you might as well just write an essay.
How many books did Ayn Rand sell?
Let the consumer judge which is a better messenger.
I am not sure that Quantity of book sales should be a strict metric. One could always reply with: How many Korans have been sold? or: How many Bibles have been sold?
I’m sure Rand’s atheism was distasteful to O’Connor. Nothing like a good cat fight between authors.
“How many Bibles have been sold?”
The Bible is the foundation of Western culture, which has led the world. The Koran doesn’t belong in the same sentence.
And I purposely picked those two books to show the contrast of using quantity over quality as the metric used to determine value.
You are right. Back in the sixties, the writings of Chairman Mao, the booklet or whatever, was omni-present in China - billions.
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