Mark Skousen commemorates Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged 50 years later in the Christian Science Monitor. Rand's work is not literature, exactly, but it is, according to a 1991 poll of American readers, the second most influential book ever written. Only the Bible was voted more influential.
I'm not sure about this assessment myself, since back in the late fifties and early sixties everyone was reading Rand, and then shortly thereafter we suffered our national, wrenching lurch to the left which represented in many ways everything Rand deplored.
In any event, Atlas Shrugged is a book of philosophical ideas about morality, economics, and collectivism set as a novel. Her ideas are both good and bad. When they're good they're very good and when they're bad they're very bad. Skousen's essay sorts them out.
RLC
