In Atlas Shrugged, on the contrary, Rand’s moral exemplars are women and men of business for whom doing well and doing good are perfectly aligned because they are one and the same.
Last but not least, readers may have an enduring appetite for a novel about business that isn’t premised on the evils of capitalism. But overall, her head rules, along with her principles, and she runs a railroad without sentimentality - or timidity. Taggart, an engineer, is as prone to pride and love and sympathy as anyone else. The heroine of Atlas Shrugged is just such a woman, a confident executive who disdains fools and slackers and considers her sexuality a gift that should never be sacrificed to convention. Exhibit A would be the novel’s brainy and disciplined protagonist, Dagny Taggart.ĭuring the book’s decades in print, the appetite for stories about strong women has only increased. People prone to reading 1,100-page novels about business may also be especially susceptible to the book’s defense of rationalism, which is made by characters who aren’t bloodless robots but passionate human beings.
At a time when success is often dismissed as “privilege,” Rand tells achievers they have earned it. But it would be fairer to observe that the novel’s message of self-reliance and success without guilt appeals to a certain class of high performers across the generations - and may hit home with all the more force in our own therapeutic and hypersensitive age. Why, then, does the book excite such enduring interest in readers - particularly in young readers - year after year?Ī cynic might say that selfishness never goes out of style. In its Manichean world view, people come in two basic varieties: producers and looters. Sixty-three years after it was first published, the book still sells.Ītlas Shrugged is of course much reviled among the bien-pensants, partly for being a terrible book but mostly for exalting an ethos of unabashed self-interest. In 2012, the Library solicited suggestions for an exhibition on books that shaped America. Atlas Shrugged came in second - after the Bible. Whatever its literary shortcomings, there’s no denying its cultural impact.Ī 1991 survey for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked Americans which books had most influenced their lives. This is a novel, after all, that venerates risk-taking executives and innovators as heroes. Sooner or later, a regular column on business and literature must face up to the 1,100-page gorilla of the genre and deal with libertarian icon Ayn Rand’s strange and furious magnum opus.
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