In the following excerpt, Merrill praises Atlas Shrugged for its complex literary style and compelling characterizations.
With the publication of Atlas Shruggedin 1957 Rand reached the destination of her intellectual journey - the Taggart Terminal. She had purged the last vestiges of Nietzsche's errors from her thinking, and completely integrated her ideas into her own philosophical system, Objectivism. The great question of her life, the dilemma of the rational person in an irrational society, at last was solved to her satisfaction. The concept of the "sanction of the victim" provided her answer - and provided also the key plot device, the strike of the men of the mind, for her greatest novel.
Atlas Shrugged, from a purely stylistic or literary point of view, is inferior to The Fountain-head But as an intellectual achievement, it is far.....
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