• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1511 0

’s girlish English heroine from 1915 who machine-gunned the invading Germans.) As the group of heroes returns in John Galt’s plane to their utopia in Colorado, the lights of New York City flicker and go out. This is the sign that Galt and his fellow strikers—that is, Albert Jay Nock’s Remnant of right-thinking men—have been waiting for. Back in the valley, Ayn Rand’s ideal man and his companions prepare to leave their enclave of justice, independence, and free trade to return to the world, which is now prepared to admit how much it needs the men of the mind, the moralists, and the producers.

While she worked on the final chapters, the Collective prepared for the intellectual sea change they thought the book would bring.

TWELVE

ATLAS SHRUGGED

1957

If anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark: I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say: “The explanation rests.”

—”The Goal of My Writing,” 1963

If The Fountainhead introduced a new and radical brand of American individualism, Atlas Shrugged resurrected interest in American capitalism at a time when it was under pressure by both the liberal Left and the Christian Right. Rand didn’t praise capitalism as the best of a bad set of choices, as the Buckleyites did, or even as a means by which the poor would prosper, although she believed it was. She defined it, lovingly, as the only economic system in history to be rooted in and inextricable from individual rights: the freedom to choose an occupation, to earn and spend money in a free market of consumer goods, and to own the fruits of one’s own creativity and labor in the form of private property. Capitalism set the individual, especially the creative individual, free to invent, produce, and thrive. When reflecting on the novel’s theme in a letter to her friend John Chamberlain, she put it more aggressively. “Those who are anti-business are anti-life,” she wrote.

If We the Living had exposed the lethal effects of totalitarian state power on the best and most spirited individuals in a closed society; if Anthem had charted an escape from the tyranny of brotherhood; and if The Fountainhead had defined the struggle of a free, active, self-reliant individual against a culture of suffocating conformity, then Atlas Shrugged extended the perspective to reveal a new ideological and social order, one in which those who are independent, purposeful, creative, and proud no longer have to fight or suffer. It was an oblation to her father and grandfather and a public tribute to her own gifts and strengths.

Minus Galt’s speech and the last unfinished chapters, this was the book that she presented to publishers in November 1956. She had decided not to show the text of the speech to interested parties until after the first round of negotiations. Her original contract with Bobbs-Merrill for The Fountainhead required her to submit the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged to that firm before offering it to others. She did so. But she was determined to keep the firm from buying it. Still angry at BobbsMerrill for its failures to support The Fountainhead, she was drawing up a list of terms she thought it would refuse to meet when the company’s sales director Ross Baker phoned and invited her and Collins to meet him over dinner. “What is it you want to discuss?” she asked on the phone. The book she had submitted was far too long, he replied. He wanted to mention sections that might be trimmed or cut, including, she later learned, to her horror, Francisco d’Anconia’s masterful fivepage speech about the benefits of a money economy and the profit motive, ending with a paean to America: “To the glory of mankind,” he tells the guests at James Taggart’s wedding reception, “there was for the first and only time a country of money, and I have no higher or more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. … Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created,” and thus they invented the felicitous