In 1926, at the age of twenty-one, Ayn Rand escaped to the United States, the country that she loved. For approximately the first six months of her stay in America, she lived with relatives in Chicago. One of her relatives owned a movie theater there, which she visited almost daily. At this time, she worked on her English language skills by practicing the writing of screenplays. She lived in America for the rest of her life, until her death in 1982. In the United States, she changed her name to Ayn Rand, probably to protect her family, who still lived in Russia under the brutal dictator, Joseph Stalin.

After DeMille closed his studio, Rand worked as a filing clerk in RKO’s wardrobe department, becoming the department head within a year. At about this time, she bought her first portable typewriter and began her writing career. During her free time, she wrote screenplays and short stories, and began her first novel, We the Living, a semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman struggling to reach her personal goals under the Communists in the Soviet Union, which was eventually published in 1936. Before the novel’s publication, she sold a screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios for a modest sum that was sufficient for her to quit the wardrobe department and concentrate on full-time writing.

During the 1930s, she authored a courtroom drama, which ran on Broadway for more than six months, entitled Night of January 16^th. The play’s most striking feature was that the jury was composed of volunteers from the audience—so that the story had two different endings depending on the jury’s verdict.

During this period, she also wrote her novella, Anthem, which is generally considered her first work of great fiction. It has sold several million copies, and is widely read today in American high schools. Anthem tells the story of an independent young mind in a Communist-style totalitarian state of the future, where all freedom of thought and expression has been abolished. Even the language has been thoroughly collectivized: all first-person singular pronouns have been expunged; men are executed for discovering and speaking the “Unmentionable Word”—“I”; and individuals think and speak of themselves exclusively as “we.” The suppression of individual thought has plunged the society into a second dark age. The story’s hero, Equality 7-2521, a Thomas Edison of his generation, reinvents the electric light. His gravest sin, however, is that he dares to think, act, and stand alone against the all-powerful state—crimes for which he is condemned to death. The story presents a powerful case for the freedom and rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the totalitarian state.

Ayn Rand began full-time work on her greatest novel, Atlas Shrugged, in April 1946. She worked on it for many years (she stated that she wrote every page of the 1,000-page book a minimum of five times) and was finally ready to publish it in 1957. Its main idea was to raise and answer the question: What would happen to the world if its greatest thinkers—the scientists, philosophers, writers, artists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and industrialists—went on strike?

He also proposed to her a kind of philosophical contest for her manuscript—that she should offer it to multiple publishers, see what their respective attitudes toward her philosophy were, as well as how those attitudes would affect their promotional efforts for the book, and then judge for herself who she considered the best publisher for it. Cerf’s blunt honesty and literary insight appealed to Ayn Rand, and they became good friends.

The reviews were generally scathing. One prominent critic dismissed it as “a remarkably silly book,” said it could be called a novel only by “devaluing the term,” complained that its shrillness is without reprieve, and concluded that Rand was akin to the Nazis—that every page of the book commands: “To a concentration camp go!” One religious reviewer stated it was the “most immoral and destructive book he’d ever read,” but took comfort in the belief that its 500,000 words could not long endure in print. A famous writer described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.” The New York Times proclaimed that the book was “written out of hate.” The Los Angeles Times—not to be outdone—argued that it would be hard to find such a display of “grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.” The New Yorker at least maintained a sense of humor about it: commenting on a scene in which the American economy is so depressed by socialist policies that a man is witnessed pulling a plow by hand, it stated, “Even the horse, it appears, cannot survive when liberals flourish.” Another witty reviewer called the 1,000-page book “longer than life and twice as preposterous.” Still another, not so witty, likened Atlas Shrugged to Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf.

And yet, Atlas Shrugged founded a movement. Rand’s growing number of intellectual supporters, both inside and outside the universities, fire back that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written, that its brilliant plot alone ranks it as superlative literature, and that the reviews are nonobjective smears from writers who could not distinguish an extraordinary work of art from a book that espoused ideas with which they strongly disagreed.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which she named Objectivism, is dramatized throughout the action of Atlas Shrugged and is presented, as well, in numerous later works of nonfiction. She argues that rational thought, not faith or feelings, is man’s sole means of gaining knowledge and advancing his life on earth; that the mind is mankind’s survival instrument, and that any form of abrogating reason—religious faith, for example—is harmful to human life. She claims that reality is exclusively the world of nature—that no supernatural dimension exists—and that a rational mind is capable of understanding this world, but not altering it, by a sheer process of thought. She argues that the world is lawful, and that no amount of wishing, praying, or believing can make burning bushes speak, men live inside of whales, or virgins give birth—that such miraculous claims are worse than false: they are impossible.

Further, according to Rand, human beings are not the pitiful antiheroes depicted in serious modern literature and film—helplessly buffeted by social forces, repressed psychological conflicts, or dysfunctional families. In her novels, she pr...