Over the years the cover has changed but the book and what each person takes away from the book, does not.
Whether you loved it or hated it, you cannot deny that a book that is spoken about 50 yrs after it was written, has its own appeal.
We have given our thoughts on the book in different posts over the months, found here , here, here and here, so instead of discussing the personal meaning I took from the book, lets look at the writer and the changing face of the front of the book over the years.
Throughout this piece I will also spotlight some of my favorite quotes from the book. (The very last quote will explain the title of the book)
First Quote:
"Who is John Galt?"
Ayn Rand wrote this book and others, she was, by any account, an amazing woman.
Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine she decided to make fiction writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired.Second Quote:
During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school. The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father's pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be.
When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her one great pleasure was Western films and plays. Long an admirer of cinema, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting.
In late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.
On Ayn Rand's second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later.
After struggling for several years at various nonwriting jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., she sold her first screenplay, "Red Pawn," to Universal Pictures in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1934 but was rejected by numerous publishers, until The Macmillan Company in the United States and Cassells and Company in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels, it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny.
She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as "he could be and ought to be." The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.
Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but wartime restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for Hal Wallis Productions, she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged.
Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles which make such individuals possible.
Thereafter, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism, which she characterized as "a philosophy for living on earth.". She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for six books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.
Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totalling more than twenty million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.
Title: A Brief Biography of Ayn Rand
Author: The Ayn Rand Institute
Year: 1995
(Source, the Ayn Rand institute)
"I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
Aging myself here, this was the cover of the Atlas Shrugged book I first owned.
In "Atlas Shrugged", Ayn Rand wrote a philosophic mystery story that she said integrated metaphysics, politics, economics and sex. It also presented for the first time her original philosophic system, later called "Objectivism," a philosophy advocating reason, rational selfishness and laissez-faire capitalism. The theme of "Atlas Shrugged" is "the role of the mind in man's existence," and the novel dramatizes what would happen to the world if the creators withdrew their works. "Atlas Shrugged" became an immediate best-seller, but was so vilified by critics and academics at the time that Ayn Rand realized she would have to become a full-time philosopher in order to defend and spread the philosophy that made her fictional heroes possible.
Third Quote:
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it"
"Atlas Shrugged" currently sells more copies than ever before, it is studied every year by thousands of students and is regularly cited by businessmen, athletes, scholars and politicians as a book that changed their lives. Even though it was written a half-century ago, the ideas in "Atlas Shrugged" are still profoundly relevant to the moral, cultural and political issues we face today. As Ayn Rand herself explained: "My attitude toward my writing is best expressed by a statement of Victor Hugo: 'If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.'"
The book started with the question "Who is John Galt" and by the end of the book we find out the answer, we meet him as well as a group of outstanding characters.
So, who is John Galt?
He was an astounding man that said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did.
Buy the book if you want to see how he accomplished this.
Fourth Quote:
"I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
The Wall Street Journal reports that 150,000 copies of this book is sold each year.... 50 yrs after it was written.
Fifty years ago today Ayn Rand published her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged." It's an enduringly popular novel -- all 1,168 pages of it -- with some 150,000 new copies still sold each year in bookstores alone. And it's always had a special appeal for people in business.
Imagine writing a book that 50 yrs afterwards still had that affect on people and still sold those amounts. That is a feat you cannot deny, whether you like her writings or not.
Fifth Quote:
"[Robin Hood] was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich-or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich."
Michelle Malkin points out Robert Tracinski's "“The Historic Significance of Atlas Shrugged:”
Throughout most of mankind's history, moralists have warned that individuals driven by "greed" and left free to pursue their self-interest would plunge society into a destructive war of all against all, a system of brutality, plunder, and exploitation--precisely the qualities Marx projected onto the new capitalist system. Instead, capitalism produced a system of freedom, independence, prosperity, and super-abundant creative energy--while the societies most thoroughly dedicated to the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, the 20th century's Communist regimes, were guilty of the greatest crimes ever recorded.
The lessons of this history were not lost on Ayn Rand, who had escaped from the Soviet Union to America in the 1920s, experiencing in a brief span the most complete contrast between opposing social systems. As her own answer to altruism, Ayn Rand offered a morality of self-interest in which the individual's central moral goal is the pursuit of his own happiness:For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors--between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
Yet what is radical about this idea is not merely Ayn Rand's defense of self-interest but her redefinition of the moral meaning of selfishness.
Most intellectuals have accepted the old altruist caricature of self-interest as brute criminality, as if the only choice we face is between forms of sacrifice: sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others or sacrificing others to ourselves. Yet this caricature is thoroughly refuted by the history of capitalism. The philosophy of altruism gives us a choice between two moral models: Mother Theresa or Al Capone. Yet where is the room in this philosophy for a Bill Gates, a Thomas Edison, or any of the thousands of other figures who populate the history of capitalism, building their own fortunes through the creation of new ideas and products?
For the first time, Ayn Rand recognized the reality and significance of these men and drew a profound moral lesson: that genuine self-interest means, not the short-range conniving of the brute, but the creative thought and productive effort of the entrepreneur.
Ayn Rand's detractors sometimes dismiss her novels as "unrealistic," but it is today's mainstream intellectuals who frequently seem as if they are wandering around in a fog of unreality, missing the monumental lessons of two centuries of history.
The era of encroaching global socialism has since given way to an era of global capitalism, which is beginning to transform the lives of billions of people across the globe, from Eastern Europe to India to China. But there is no one to help them understand what capitalism is, its deepest personal meaning for their lives and values, and why it is good.
No one, that is, except Ayn Rand. And that is why Atlas Shrugged is even more relevant and necessary today than it was when it was first published five decades ago.
This is just a teaser, please go read his whole piece, it is excellent.
Last Quote:
If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?
To shrug.
Tracked back by:
Wisdom From Ayn Rand-UPDATED AND BUMPED from Miss Beth's Victory Dance...
.
