Is Ayn Rand Ready for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie?

The first edition of Atlas Shrugged.

There’s never been a writer quite like Ayn Rand. Her third novel, The Fountainhead (1943), won her an enduring, impassioned following by extolling what she would later call “the virtue of selfishness.” But The Fountainhead wasn’t her masterpiece. On September 2, 1946—60 years ago today—she began writing her magnum opus. Its first line was “Who is John Galt?” Eleven years later, Atlas Shrugged, her massive novel about a dystopian America, was finally published.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. She witnessed the Communist revolution, during which her father’s pharmacy business was seized and nationalized. The Communist notion of sublimating one’s own needs and desires for the good of others (or of the state) was abhorrent to the fledgling author; it drove her to a philosophy of extreme individualism that she would embrace for the rest of her life.

After a stint at Petrograd State University, where she studied the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, she enrolled at a Soviet film school. But she knew that if she wanted be a successful screenwriter she’d have to go to the world center of the movie industry, the United States, which she saw as a bastion of freedom. Before long she had changed her name to Ayn Rand. (“Ayn” was the name of a Finnish writer she admired; “Rand” apparently came from the Cyrillic spelling of her surname.) By late 1926 she had reached Hollywood, where she met the director Cecil B. DeMille and was hired as an extra on his 1927 Biblical epic The King of Kings. There she met her future husband, the actor Frank O’Connor. In 1929 she began writing her first novel, We the Living (1934), an antitotalitarian melodrama set in Soviet Russia. She also sold a screenplay to Universal Pictures and had a stage play, Night of January 16th, produced on Broadway. But real financial success eluded her.

Her breakthrough novel was The Fountainhead. The plot, about an uncompromising architect named Howard Roark, clarified many of her unusual ideas. In it people are effectively divided into two types: the heroic egoist, who follows his own judgment and mind without regard to the opinions of others, and the “second-hander,” who has no opinions of his own and so is slave to those of others. Rand later wrote that the book was about “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man’s soul.” The novel was rejected by 12 publishers before finally being picked up by Bobbs-Merrill, and then sales were slow. But over the next two years, word of mouth spread. By mid-1945, The Fountainhead had sold an impressive 150,000 copies, and it would go on to sell hundreds of thousands more. It made Rand a very rich woman. It would later be made into a movie starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

Around the time of The Fountainhead’s publication, Rand was discussing the novel on the phone with a fellow author, Isabel Paterson, who had suggested that she write a nonfiction book explaining her philosophy. She rejected the idea, but Paterson insisted that the public needed it. “Oh, they do?” Rand replied sarcastically. “What if I went on strike? What if all the creative minds of the world went on strike?” She offhandedly remarked that such a strike would make for a good novel, and after she hung up, her husband, who had overheard the conversation, agreed. The idea would become the seed for Atlas Shrugged, which she began writing two years later, on September 2, 1946. She aimed to write no less than her masterwork, the final word on her philosophy, and the process was grueling and lengthy. The book, more than a thousand pages long, was finally published in October 1957.

In it the United States has come under the control of what Rand calls “looters”—people who have no original thoughts or creativity and sponge off those who do. The government passes draconian laws restricting free and open trade and rewarding those who have connections instead of those who have genuine talent. All the real heroes, in Rand’s view—those who follow the dictates of their own minds, and no one else’s—mysteriously disappear, and the country, helpless without a force to guide it, descends into chaos and ruin. Later it becomes clear that the true individualists have all gone on strike, having “shrugged” off responsibility for anyone other than themselves, and withdrawn from the world to an idealized encampment, high in the mountains, under the leadership and inspiration of John Galt, a genius philosopher who eventually takes over the national radio airwaves to hold forth on his (and Rand’s) ideas. He holds forth for dozens of pages.

Throughout the novel money is promoted as not the root of all evil but in fact the source of most good, since it rewards real achievement. (The dollar sign itself is a recurrent symbol.) At the book’s end the heroes return to society to rebuild the shattered world according to their own ultra-free-market ideals.

Like The Fountainhead, the new novel took a while to find its audience, but within two months it made it to the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained in the top 10 for 18 weeks. Most of the reviews, however, were scathing. Atlas Shrugged, it seemed, had something to offend everybody. Its atheistic streak turned off many, and its unabashed glorification of uncontrolled capitalism irritated others. One critic, Whittaker Chambers (best known for accusing the State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy), implied in National Review that the book was outright fascist: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” Many other critics pronounced the book poorly written to the point of being nearly unreadable.

But Rand was undaunted. She felt she had done what she had set out to do. Indeed, she never again wrote fiction. She went on to give many talks at universities and write many works of nonfiction outlining her systematic philosophy, which she called Objectivism. She died in New York in 1982 at the age of 77. The Ayn Rand Institute still works to spread her ideas.

Rand’s extreme individualism and spirited defense of capitalistic competition were later embraced by many among the rich and powerful. Alan Greenspan, who would later head the Federal Reserve, was her friend and a member of her inner circle in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s not a stretch to suggest that today’s neoconservative political movement shows a Rand influence. And a movie version of Atlas Shrugged is now in development, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in talks to possibly star. That could spread Rand’s influence even further.

Who is John Galt? Soon everyone at the local multiplex may know.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.