(Then again, I kinda like Free Will. And I’d pay good money to see a movie of Illuminatus! But Rand? Has anyone ever successfully gotten through all of Atlas Shrugged? I personally didn’t make it through chapter 1.)

So your peculiar brand of literary criticism has no respect for the tastes of wider society? Good for you!

Imagine my shock when in college I met people who took that stuff seriously, even considered it a workable politics. Kept far away from them, though.

Ahh, free market philistinism. Rand would be proud.

Anyway, it is my understanding that Neil Peart disavowed randianism—like most people enamored with Rand, he grew up and then out of the affliction. so far as I know, he’s not even libertarian anymore.

Didn’t Melville die in poverty, or something like that? Admittedly he had some bestsellers, but his Great Novel wasn’t read that widely in his lifetime.

Well, Native Son also has a thirty page political speech at the end and it is a very good novel indeed (it’s a rather better political speech than the one in Atlas Shrugged, mainly because the protagonist doesn’t have the burden of also having to give a primer in Rand’s slightly odd epistemology).

I’ll admit first, so you’ll have something to sneer at: I read Atlas Shrugged. I was 18, immature, insecure, and had a long commute in the summer.

I read it last month and have no excuses at all.

‘Alongside Night’ which I approached with some trepidation, after seeing the reference to Rand on the cover seems likely to be much better (it is a hell ofg a lot shoreter for one) – as indeed did Jack London in ‘The Iron Heel’.

Firstly, he was bad at writing German. He interspersed his manuscripts at random with other languages, signally failing to care whether his reader understood what he wrote; what he writes on Victorian society is certainly thorough, true, and scathing, but what he writes on what would succeed it is, essentially, fevered rambling.

Secondly, he failed to make a living as a writer; he died in debt, despite Engels regularly stealing sums from his family’s cotton factory and supporting him on it. I would submit that inherent in the “Great Writer” thing is that enough people should read the writer’s work that writing it would be worth the time. Even Communists didn’t read Marx if they could at all avoid it.

But…

Read the news lately, anyone? A country is in an inexorable economic decline, social tensions are rising, and a bureaucratic elite tries to keep things together with daily bureaucratic dictats that range from the ineffective to the absurd, while gingerly trying not to provoke popular backlashes that are also farcical. Sure seems to ring a bell.

It doesn’t make Ayn Rand into a prophet. It just shows Odin is sleeping off a mead binge and Loki is taking a vacation in France. And boy, does that trickster god have a twisted sense of humor.

if you happen by the IMDB page for atlas shrugged and click on the name james v. hart, it will lead you to the screenwriter of (among other things) T&A Academy 2, hook and dracula.

if that doesn;t give credit to the ‘movie as parody of the book’ theory, i don’t know what will.

It really doesn’t matter that he wrote lousy a lousy novel, he was still ‘a writer’ and saw himself as part of that tradition. I remember arguing with Henry about Marx’s determinism, but Marx was a craftsman who used his craft to argue for a logic. That contradiction is lost in the 20th century, where intellectuals disdained craft and craftsmen.
I’ve gotten in fights here with people who’ve argued that science makes literature besides the point.

And Marx could recite pages and pages of Shakespeare from memory.