Atlas Shrugged Essay | Critical Essay #6

Atlas Shrugged Critical Essay #6

In the following excerpt, Blackman briefly looks at the America that Rand portrays in Atlas Shrugged.

In a statement published as a postscript to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand has defined her philosophy, "in essence," as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute "

Atlas Shrugged is [a] ... polemic inadequately disguised as a novel and designed to dramatize these views. The result is an astonishing mixture of anti-Communist manifesto, superman, and the lush lady novelist Ethel M. Dell—a novel that does its own purpose a disservice through caricature and oversimplification.

Miss Rand postulates an America in a time of waning strength and production. The government is being delivered into the hands of the "looters," despicable men whose plundering is rationalized by mouthing...
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