Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand

Sales

Atlas Shrugged debuted at number 13 on The New York Times Best Seller list three days after its publication. It peaked at number 3 on December 8, 1957, and was on the list for 22 consecutive weeks.[67] By 1984, its sales had exceeded five million copies.[68] Sales of Atlas Shrugged increased following the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The novel's sales in 2009 exceeded 500,000 copies,[69] and it sold 445,000 copies in 2011.[70] As of 2022, the novel had sold 10 million copies.[71]

Contemporary reviews

Atlas Shrugged was generally disliked by critics. Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs"; one called it "execrable claptrap", while another said it showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity".[72] In the Saturday Review, Helen Beal Woodward said that the novel was written with "dazzling virtuosity" but was "shot through with hatred".[73] In The New York Times Book Review, Granville Hicks similarly said the book was "written out of hate".[74] The reviewer for Time magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman – in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?"[75] Whittaker Chambers wrote what was later called the novel's most "notorious" review[76][77] for the conservative magazine National Review, where he called it "remarkably silly"[78] and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term".[79] He predicted that practicing Rand's godless ideology would lead to a dictatorship similar to Nazism or Stalinist Communism, and said that within the novel "a voice can be heard ... commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'".[80]

There were some positive reviews. Richard McLaughlin, reviewing the novel for The American Mercury, described it as a "long overdue" polemic against the welfare state with an "exciting, suspenseful plot", although unnecessarily long. He drew a comparison with the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, saying that a "skillful polemicist" did not need a refined literary style to have a political impact.[81] Journalist and book reviewer John Chamberlain, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, found Atlas Shrugged satisfying on many levels: as science fiction, as a "philosophical detective story", and as a "profound political parable".[82]

Influence and legacy

Atlas Shrugged has attracted an energetic and committed fan base. Each year, the Ayn Rand Institute donates 400,000 copies of works by Rand, including Atlas Shrugged, to high school students.[60] According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Atlas Shrugged was ranked second among the books that made the most difference in the lives of 17 out of 2,032 Book-of-the-Month club members who responded, between the Bible and M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled.[83][84] Modern Library's 1998 nonscientific online poll of the 100 best novels of the 20th century found Atlas rated No. 1, although it was not included on the list chosen by the Modern Library board of authors and scholars.[85][86] The 2018 PBS Great American Read television series found Atlas Shrugged rated number 20 out of 100 novels,[87] based on a YouGov survey "asking Americans to name their most-loved novel".[88]

Rand's impact on contemporary libertarian thought has been considerable. The title of one libertarian magazine, Reason: Free Minds, Free Markets, is taken from John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, who argues that "a free mind and a free market are corollaries". In a tribute written on the 20th anniversary of the novel's publication, libertarian philosopher John Hospers praised it as "a supreme achievement, guaranteed of immortality".[89] In 1997, the libertarian Cato Institute held a joint conference with The Atlas Society, an Objectivist organization, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged.[90] At this event, Howard Dickman of Reader's Digest stated that the novel had "turned millions of readers on to the ideas of liberty" and said that the book had the important message of the readers' "profound right to be happy".[90]

Rand's former business partner and lover Nathaniel Branden expressed differing views of Atlas Shrugged. He was initially quite favorable to it, and even after he and Rand ended their relationship, he still referred to it in an interview as "the greatest novel that has ever been written", although he found "a few things one can quarrel with in the book".[91] However, in 1984 he argued that Atlas Shrugged "encourages emotional repression and self-disowning" and that Rand's works contained contradictory messages. He criticized the potential psychological impact of the novel, stating that Galt's recommendation to respond to wrongdoing with "contempt and moral condemnation" clashes with the view of psychologists who say this only causes the wrongdoing to repeat itself.[92]

The Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises admired the unapologetic elitism he saw in Rand's work. In a letter to Rand written a few months after the novel's publication, he said it offered "a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled 'intellectuals' and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties ... You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you."[93]

Murray Rothbard, another Austrian School economist, wrote a letter to Rand in 1958 in which he praised the book as "an infinite treasure house" and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, [but] one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction".[94] Rothbard soon distanced himself from Rand due to various disagreements in philosophy, and in the early 1960s he wrote a satirical one-act play titled Mozart Was a Red that spoofed Rand (as the character Carson Sand) and the novel (as Sand's book The Brow of Zeus).[95]

In the years immediately following the novel's publication, many American conservatives, such as William F. Buckley Jr., strongly disapproved of Rand and her Objectivist message. In addition to the strongly critical review by Whittaker Chambers, Buckley published a number of critical pieces: Russell Kirk called Objectivism an "inverted religion"; Frank Meyer accused Rand of "calculated cruelties" and called her message an "arid subhuman image of man"; and Garry Wills regarded Rand a "fanatic".[96]

In the 21st century, the novel was referred to more positively by some conservatives. In 2005, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan said that Rand was "the reason I got into public service", and he required his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged,[97] although in 2012 he said his supposed devotion to Rand was "an urban legend".[98] In 2006, Clarence Thomas, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, cited Atlas Shrugged as among his favorite novels.[99] Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, conservative commentators suggested the book as a warning against a socialistic reaction to the crisis. Conservative commentators Neal Boortz,[100] Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh[101] offered praise of the book on their respective radio and television programs. In January 2009, conservative writer Stephen Moore wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Atlas Shrugged From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years",[102] and two months later Republican Congressman John Campbell said, "People are starting to feel like we're living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged."[103] Outside of the US, the novel has been cited as an influence by politicians such as Siv Jensen in Norway[104] and Ayelet Shaked in Israel.[105]

References to Atlas Shrugged have appeared in a variety of other popular entertainments. In the first season of the drama series Mad Men, Bert Cooper urges Don Draper to read the book, and Don's sales pitch tactic to a client indicates he has been influenced by the strike plot.[106] Less positive mentions of the novel occur in episodes of the animated comedies Futurama, where it appears among the library of books flushed down to the sewers to be read only by grotesque mutants, and South Park, where a newly literate character gives up on reading after experiencing Atlas Shrugged.[107] The critically acclaimed 2007 video game BioShock is widely considered to be a response to Atlas Shrugged. The story depicts a society that has collapsed due to Objectivism, and significant characters in the game owe their naming to Rand's work, which the game's creator Ken Levine found "really fascinating".[108]

In 2013, it was announced that Galt's Gulch, a settlement for libertarian devotees named for John Galt's safe haven, would be established near Santiago in Chile,[109] but the project collapsed amid accusations of fraud.[110]

Awards

Atlas Shrugged was a finalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1958, but lost to The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.[111] In 1983, it was one of the first two books given the Prometheus Awards' Hall of Fame Award for libertarian science fiction, alongside The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.[112]