The projection of "things as they might be and ought to be" names the essence of Ayn Rand's concept of literature. In the wave of Naturalism that has engulfed the literature of the twentieth century, her novels are an outstanding exception. They are at once a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a significant departure from the mainstream of that tradition: she is a Romantic Realist. "Romantic"—because her work is concerned with values, with the essential, the...

Perhaps it is fair to say that if there is one message Ayn Rand the theorist would have wanted to leave us it is, philosophy matters! The recent death of Ayn Rand provides the occasion for us to recall the importance of this message. In the heat of contemporary social and political debates we often forget to consider basic principles. The writings of Ayn Rand will always be with us as a reminder that pragmatism and expediency are ultimately self-defeating. And it is in this spirit of a concern for basic que...

Miss Rand is a profoundly poor writer. To say that her plots are absurdly tendentious, her characters no more than wooden puppets, and her diction utterly without grace or beauty (all of which is quite true) is to give no real idea of the quality of her novels. They are completely bad, from conception to expression. All her writing might quite properly be called fantastic. It is not simply that two of her four novels deal with the future,… but rather an atmosphere common to all which is so charged wi...

[The following essay was originally published in Esquire, July, 1961.] Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. (p. 261)