The Moral Idealism of Ayn Rand: From Anthem to Atlas Shrugged - Paperback

by Robert Mayhew (Foreword by), Onkar Ghate (Author)

Critics of Ayn Rand's fiction have long charged that her novels are little more than propaganda-vehicles for philosophic speeches, not works of genuine literature. In this essential collection, Onkar Ghate illuminates what Rand's critics have missed and her admirers have often only sensed: that her four major novels are inseparable from the philosophy she formulated.

Drawing on close readings of all four of Rand's major novels-We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged-Ghate reveals the inextricable relationship between Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, and her fiction. These are not didactic works dressed up as novels. They are philosophical stories in the deepest sense: narratives in which plot, characters, and theme are inseparable from the new ideas they embody.

For anyone who wants to understand Ayn Rand as she understood herself-equally and inextricably a novelist and a philosopher-this volume is essential reading.