Ayn Rand
Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on January 20 (Russian Old Style), 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, later Alice O’Connor (an Americanized married name), Ayn Rand became a disruptive force of nature in literature and philosophy by writing plays, novels, essays, economic and philosophical treatises, and establishing herself as a commentator on the society in the mid-20th Century.
Having cut a larger-than-life figure during her lifetime, Rand and her writings have not faded away since her death in 1982. Aspects of her stated philosophy, as inconsistent or idiosyncratic as it may be, have been adopted and proclaimed by a heterogeneous assembly of groups. Rand herself would have been delighted and appalled by the attention and the creative straying from the ideas in her works. She did not suffer dissent graciously, considering how much she glorified it, but that too is an path of interest for some readers of her books. There is an irony that the founder of the Objectivist movement/school/philosophy seems to generate passions for and against her that are anything but objective or rational.
At any rate, I have sold Ayn Rand steadily and consistently since opening Whistlestop in 1985. I have sold her books to True Believers and to skeptics and to the curious. I provide this page in appreciation of her ability to unsettle readers to this day.
Atlas Shrugged [trade paperback with L. Peikoff introduction]
Atlas Shrugged [trade paperback with L. Peikoff introduction]
Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves?
You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy…why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction…why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph…why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill.
Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.