ATLAS SHRUGGED

by AYN RAND

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New softcover book. 50th Anniversary Edition, 1080 pages, including introduction by Leonard Peikoff and reader's guide to the writings of Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battle 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 learn the answers 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 remarkable book. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, this is unlike any other book you have ever read. It is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder - and rebirth - of man's spirit.

With this acclaimed work and its immortal query "Who is John Galt?", Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. This is the book that made her not only one of the most popular novelists of our century, but also one of its most influential and controversial thinkers.

First published in 1957 in the United States, Atlas Shrugged was Rand's last work of fiction before concentrating her writings exclusively on philosophy, politics and cultural criticism. At over one thousand pages in length, she considered it her magnum opus. At approximately 645,000 words, Atlas Shrugged is one of the longest novels ever written in any European language. The book explores a number of philosophical themes that Rand would subsequently develop into the philosophy of Objectivism.

As millions of readers have discovered, Atlas Shrugged is precisely the kind of novel you cannot put down.

Atlas Shrugged sweeps the reader into its own world of larger-than-life characters - including the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy and the great industrialist who doesn't know that he is working for his own destruction. The story is a mystery about a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Society disintegrates, food shortages spark riots, factories shutdown by the hundreds. Is this man a vicious destroyer - or the greatest of liberators? What is the motor of the world? What is required to restart it? The answers emerge in the novel's logical yet astounding climax. The answers are of profound significance not merely for the resolution of the story's central conflict - but also for man's life in reality, today.

Atlas Shrugged presents the consummate Ayn Rand hero - and the radically new moral and philosophic principles by which he lives. This philosophic underpinning is the system of ideas Ayn Rand called Objectivism. With the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's career as a fiction writer came to an end. In subsequent years, she devoted her time to lecturing and writing extensively on the nature and applications of her new philosophy.

About the Author

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 25 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.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand