Atlas Shrugged

The year 2005 marks Ayn Rand’s Centennial Year. The astounding story of a man that said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is unlike any other book you have ever read. “A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly.”—The New York Times

Encyclopedia of Literature

The book's female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures and restrictions of massive bureaucracy. Her antagonistic reaction to a libertarian group seeking an end to government regulation is later echoed and modified in her encounter with a utopian community, Galt's Gulch, whose members regard self-determination rather than collective responsibility as the highest ideal.

Ayn Rand is one of the rare writers who not only drew in readers with her novels, but created a philosophical movement with them. Her seminal Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, cornerstones of her individualistic Objectivist world view, can be viewed as literature, self-empowerment texts, or both.