Posted on 02/03/2015 6:02:08 AM PST by Kaslin
Interest in the bestselling novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand continues to grow, 33 years after her death and 70 years after she first hit the bestseller lists with The Fountainhead. Rand was born February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In the dark year of 1943, in the depths of World War II and the Holocaust, when the United States was allied with one totalitarian power to defeat another, three remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian movement. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had written Little House on the Prairie and other stories of American rugged individualism, published a passionate historical essay called The Discovery of Freedom. Isabel Paterson, a novelist and literary critic, produced The God of the Machine, which defended individualism as the source of progress in the world.
The other great book of 1943 was The Fountainhead, a powerful novel about architecture and integrity by Ayn Rand. The book's individualist theme did not fit the spirit of the age, and reviewers savaged it. But it found its intended readers. Its sales started slowly, then built and built. It was still on the New York Times bestseller list two full years later. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the 1940s, millions eventually, some of them because of the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and many of them were inspired enough to seek more information about Ayn Rand's ideas. Rand went on to write an even more successful novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957, and to found an association of people who shared her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. Although her political philosophy was libertarian, not all libertarians shared her views on metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Others were put off by the starkness of her presentation and by her cult following.
Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand demonstrates the importance of immigration not just to America but to American libertarianism. Mises had fled his native Austria right before the Nazis confiscated his library, Rand fled the Communists who came to power in her native Russia. When a heckler asked her at a public speech, "Why should we care what a foreigner thinks?", she replied with her usual fire, "I chose to be an American. What did you ever do, except for having been born?"
George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged “the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace.” Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: “Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev's assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.”
Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings.
Her books garnered millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of vivid, can’t-put-it-down novels. The people who read Ayn Rand and got the point didn’t just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.
Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of irrationality and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of “do your own thing” and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the “Me Decade” but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.
Throughout those decades her books continued to sell -- 30 million copies over the years, and they still move off the shelves. The financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts gave Atlas Shrugged a huge push. A Facebook group titled “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life” was formed. More than 50 years after publication, the book had its best sales year ever. And sales have remained high – more than a million copies of Rand’s books were sold in 2012.
College students, professors, businessmen, Paul Ryan, the rock group Rush, and Hollywood stars have all proclaimed themselves fans of Ayn Rand. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged appear on Barnes and Noble’s list of the top 50 classic bestsellers. In a survey of Book of the Month Club readers for the Library of Congress, Atlas Shrugged actually came in second to the Bible as “the most influential book for Americans today.”
Recently Rand has been the subject of major books, such as Anne Heller’s biography and Jennifer Burns’s study of her ideas, both in 2009, and profiles in USA Today, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and C-SPAN’s “American Writers” series. We’ve seen a Showtime movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, starring Helen Mirren; a documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1997; and a three-part film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. She even appeared on a first-class stamp as part of the Postal Service’s Literary Arts series. A quotation from Rand greets visitors to the American pavilion at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center.
It’s hard to think of a writer more popular – and more controversial – than Ayn Rand. Despite the enormous commercial success of her books, and the major influence she’s had on American culture, reviewers and other intellectuals have generally been hostile. They’ve dismissed her support for individualism and capitalism, ridiculed her “purple prose,” and mocked her black-and-white morality. None of which seems to have dissuaded her millions of readers.
Although she did not like to acknowledge debts to other thinkers, Rand’s work rests squarely within the libertarian tradition, with roots going back to Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, and Mises. She infused her novels with the ideas of individualism, liberty, and limited government in ways that often changed the lives of her readers. The cultural values she championed – reason, science, individualism, achievement, and happiness – are spreading across the
In before the Rand-hating Freepers start trashing her.
I’m not an Objectivist, but in freshman year in college (1968) I discovered her, and became the only free-market advocating college newspaper editor in the country, when all the others were joining SDS.
God bless her, atheist though she was. She changed my life.
I agree with that. Rest in peace.
5.56mm
Sort of like a Sarah Palin before there was a Sarah Palin.
I think Rand became an atheist because she witnessed in her lifetime both (dare I say it!) Jews and Catholics voting for Democrats and their advocacy of Socialism, having escaped from Communism herself.
Atlas does shrug every day on a microeconomic level. Every time a citizen leaves or a business shuts its doors in Kalif or NYC and relocates in Texas or Idaho, Altlas has shrugged.
Rand provides us with a real 'secret decoder ring' and the message is certainly not 'Be sure to drink your Ovaltine'!
I like that analogy. I read AS in college and frankly didn’t get much out of it other than a defense of capitalism and the strength of the individual. Then I re-read it just last year and it was as if I were reading the daily headlines off Drudge. I came away with a much deeper understanding of what capitalism and the free enterprise system really means, it in fact is the fuel that powers the creativity and drive of the individual. People cannot accomplish great things without being in an environment that nurtures and support them in doing so. The government of AS is the sureest way to kill an economy and look around and what do we have in 2015?
Haters gonna hate. Sadly far too many on FR can’t analyze or think beyond the surface and merely mouth platitudes in an echo chamber. Great minds like Rand’s help show the way forward.
Rand gets a lot right, and a lot wrong, so pick out the good parts, and discard the bad ones.
Rand has her good points, but back in the 1970s I thought her books were so far over the top in describing the sniveling “looters” who oppose decent people that the unrealistic villains interfered with telling a good story. Since then, and especially over the past six years, I’ve realized that she understated the flaws of her looters. Obama is far worse than anything Ayn Rand ever put into her novels, probably because Obama has both George Orwell and Ayn Rand to use as blueprints for inspiration.
It looks like the article was cut off before it could all be posted.
Well, Rand attracts the same sort of Alinsky-ite personal destruction attacks as Palin does. They proves every time that Welfare State Leftism is a religion, not a political movement.
I first read Atlas a few years ago. I even made it through all of Galt’s speech. I still think about it every day, mostly because some idiot here in NYC reminds me of the looters.
Her insights, in that aspect, were profound, if not downright prophetic of today's America. Those revelations alone, the book’s imperfections aside, are more than reason enough not to dismiss the still relevant message of Atlas Shrugged.
Rand ping.
In the defense of those critics, however, I will say only that it was supposed to be fiction, not the documentary it looks like these days. That isn't Rand's fault, or that of the critics either.
Rand’s works changed my life.
Much as Sarah Palin, Rand serves as an intellectual Rorschach Test. Ask about Rand and you can separate deep intellectual thinkers from everyone else.
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