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    A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"
    A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"
    A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"
    Ebook48 pages45 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535818858
    A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" - Gale

      1

      Atlas Shrugged

      Ayn Rand

      1957

      Introduction

      The final novel written by Russian-born American philosopher and author Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged is a controversial and widely popular work. According to a 1991 Library of Congress report, it is considered the second most influential book after the Bible in the lives of its readers. A complex combination of mystery, love story, social criticism, and philosophical concepts, the 1,100—page novel embodies the author's passionate celebration of individualism, free will, capitalism, logic, and reason.

      Set in an imaginary America in a communist world, Atlas Shrugged is a sharp critique of a corrupt communist system and its damaging effects on areas as various as love, science, and industrial productivity. The novel's main protagonists, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are capitalist-minded industrialists, Atlases who carry the collapsing national economy on their backs. Things change, however, when the mysterious John Galt begins a revolution against the existing order, believing that the parasitic society would destroy itself if its competent and hard-working members would simply stop working. But first, the protagonists must learn how to let go of the ties of obligation, responsibility, and guilt connecting them to the abusive community in all aspects of their lives.

      As Rand said to her biographer, Nathaniel Branden, the novel explains her philosophical principles in a dramatic action story combining metaphysics, morality, economics, politics and sex. Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged with a sense of mission; she said, "[A]fter Atlas I was no longer pressured, my lifelong assignment was over." Despite tremendous popular success—the novel sold over 5 million copies by 1984—Rand believed she had explained her philosophical views clearly enough and did not write another word of fiction for the rest of her life

      Author Biography

      Ayn Rand, a.k.a. Alice Rosenbaum, was born on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her family was relatively wealthy; Rand's father was a self-made man who owned a pharmacy. According to her biographer, Barbara Brandon in The Passion of Ayn Rand, Rand was a precocious child who spent much time among adults, gathering information about the world around her. At the age of nine, she had already developed a strong fascination about the battle between good and evil, as well as her notion of the characteristics of the ideal man. Intelligence, independence, courage. The heroic man, she described him to her biographer. Rand later recreated this model in many of her fictional characters, including the mysterious John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.

      Rand's keen awareness of her ideological and political surroundings easily detected the problems that would begin to plague Russia in her childhood; she grew to despise the communist rule of Lenin's Bolsheviks, who came into power with the 1917 revolution. Under communism, her family was forced to give up her father's business, leave their home under the threat of ongoing internal conflicts, and almost starve to death. In her biography, Rand remembers that she began to understand that politics was a moral issue and

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