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Articles

Atlas Shrugged @ 50+

Tibor Machan considers the continuing appeal of the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand, more than fifty years after the publication of her greatest work.

Ayn Rand has never gained much support among the literati. Her novels are often dismissed as badly crafted and too ideological. In circles where one might expect that she would receive serious scrutiny, she is dismissed because of what are very arguably irrelevant elements of her work. When her most successful novel, Atlas Shrugged was first released, Whittaker Chambers gave her a very bad review in the National Review, America’s leading Christian conservative patriotic magazine at the time, mostly because Rand was an atheist and didn’t take kindly to culpably stupid people. For such sins she was compared to the Nazis.

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