Academic philosophers HATE her.

Literary critics HATE her.

She wrote popular philosophical novels, and worshipped CAPITALISM.

She loved smoking, the $, and powerful men.

Ayn Rand: woke nightmare.

Father owns a business that is taken over by the Bolsheviks = lifelong hatred of communism.

Travels to Chicago to 'visit' a cousin, never returning.

Moves to Hollywood.

Changes name: Ayn' the name of Finnish writer. 'Rand' the model of her Remington typewriter.

Fails as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

In her mid-30s publishes The Fountainhead (1943), a 700-page story of a modernist architect who battles to realize his vision.

But it's Atlas Shrugged (1957) that cements her place in history.



Heroine Dagny Taggart is a driven railroad executive who tries to run Taggart Transcontinental while fighting off state corruption on a national scale.

 There’s ruthless industrialist Hank Rearden, and the flamboyant and aristocratic mining baron Francisco D’Anconia.

The key character is John Galt. He's the greatest living philosopher and inventor.

So why - when he appears at the end of the book - is he working as a short-order COOK in a diner in the Rocky Mountains?

For Ayn Rand, the presence of wealth means that thought has taken place.

To create something and to make money out of it is the essence of morality.

In Atlas Shrugged, the people who advance civilization are sneered at as being “vulgar materialists”, and “robbers of the people”.

Why should Dagny try to save her railway while the "looters" and their public directives in the name of “the public good”, emaciate it?

Atlas Shrugged was written at a time when many intelligent people still believed in socialism.

Rand’s opposing salvo: Wealth creators be proud! Fight for your freedom to innovate and produce, and never accept the guilt of the non-productive.

The $ sign is a sacred symbol representing the triumph of the creative mind over the state, religion and tradition.

It means freedom from mediocrity and its strangling power.

Alan Greenspan, former US Fed chair, was a Rand disciple.

Before he met Rand, Greenspan appreciated the technical basis of capitalism.

After Rand, he became convinced of its MORAL force.