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History
Development
Rand, as a teenager living in Soviet Russia, initially conceived Anthem as a play.[2] After immigrating to the United States, Rand didn't think of writing Anthem there, but reconsidered after reading a short story in the Saturday Evening Post set in the future:
| “ | It was just an adventure story, but what interested me was the fact that it was the first time I saw a fantastic story in print—rather than the folks-next-door sort of serials. What impressed me was the fact that they would publish such a story. And so I thought that if they didn't mind fantasy, I would like to try Anthem. I was working on the plot of The Fountainhead at that time... I was doing architectural research, but there was no writing I could do yet, and I had to take time off once in a while to write something. So I wrote Anthem that summer of 1937.[3] | ” |
It is widely believed that the story in question was By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benét, which was published as "The Place of the Gods" in the July 31, 1937 edition of "The Saturday Evening Post".
Ayn Rand's working title was Ego. Leonard Peikoff explains the meaning behind this title: "[Rand] is (implicitly) upholding the central principles of her philosophy and of her heroes: reason, values, volition, individualism." Thinking that the original title was too blunt, unemotional, and would give away too much of the theme, Rand changed the title to Anthem. "The present novel, in Miss Rand's mind, was from the outset an ode to man's ego. It was not difficult, therefore, to change the working title: to move from 'ego' to 'ode' or 'anthem', leaving the object celebrated by the ode to be discovered by the reader."[4]
There are similarities between Anthem and the earlier novel, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, another author who had lived in communist Russia. These include:
- A novel taking the form of a secret diary or journal.
- People having numbers instead of names.
- Sexuality is highly regulated.
- A sort of 'hive mind' thought in the people of the dystopia.
- A male influenced positively by a female character.
There are also a number of differences between the two stories. For example, the society of We is in no scientific or technological decay, featuring X-rays, airplanes, microphones, and so on. In contrast, the people of Anthem believe that the world is flat and the sun revolves around it, and that bleeding people is a decent form of medicine. The similarities have led to speculation about whether Rand's story was directly influenced by Zamyatin's.[5][6] However, there is little evidence that Rand was influenced by or even read Zamyatin's work, and she never mentioned it in discussions of her life in Russia.[5][7]
Publication history
Initially, Rand planned on publishing Anthem as a magazine story or serial, but her agent encouraged her to publish it as a book. She submitted it simultaneously to Macmillan Publishers in America (who published Rand's earlier novel, We The Living) and Cassell in England. "Cassell accepted it immediately... Macmillan turned it down; their comment was: the author does not understand socialism."[8]
After the success of Rand's novel The Fountainhead, a revised 2nd edition of Anthem was published in 1946. The original English edition (Cassell 1938) entered the public domain in the United States in 1966, due to the failure to renew its copyright after 28 years as then required by US law. A 50th Anniversary Edition was published in 1995 including a appendix which reproduces the entire original British edition with Ayn Rand's handwritten editorial changes.
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