Word: rand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman-in the comic-strip or the Nietzschean version? During the book's opening passages-for 300 or 400 pages, that is-the reader cannot be sure. Then the truth emerges: Author Ayn Rand, a sort of literary Horsewoman of the Apocalypse, is smashing the world with half a million words in order to rebuild it according to her own philosophy. And that philosophy must be read to be disbelieved...
...they can build a new society. The mountain-ringed capitalist Shangri-La sounds like a prospectus for an exclusive, upper-middle-class suburb in Westchester, and is dominated by a slim granite column upholding a solid-gold dollar sign. (Readers who may suspect at this point that Author Rand's intention is satire could not be more mistaken...
...Author Rand's world shares many characteristics of science fiction-the blue-tinted fluorescent light of literary unreality; the dogged logic with which the illogical is propped up; the melodramatic simplicity that requires no score cards to tell heroes from villains. Such paladins of power and profit as Physicist John Gait, Steelmaker Hank Rearden, Billionaire Francisco d'Anconia all have noble, proudly lifted heads, clear blue (or green) eyes, frank, open expressions. Such blackguards as traitorous Businessman Orren Boyle, Bureaucrat Cuffy Meigs, Parasite Philip Rearden have eyes that are "pale and veiled" or "small black slits" or "blurred...
Materialist Morality. Author Rand's philosophy, hammered home in endless hectoring and lecturing, seems based mostly on Nietzsche's inversion of all Christian values, with an admixture of Adam Smith economics and David Hume ethics, both carried to absurd extremes. The greatest sin is following the Sermon on the Mount. Selfishness is the highest good, the spirit of sacrifice the worst evil. In shrill outcry against government and religion, Author Rand defines taxes as "protection money" paid to "gangsters," and the doctrine of Original Sin as responsible for destroying Man's "reason, morality, creativeness, joy." She frenetically...
Russian-born Author Ayn (rhymes with mine) Rand, 52, left the Soviet Union for the U.S. in 1926, rehearsed for this weird performance with The Fountainhead (1943), in which she rhapsodized the lone genius and his fight against the common herd. She deserves credit at least for imagination; unfortunately, it is tied to ludicrous naiveté. There could have been something exhilarating about the capitalists' revolt-except for the fact that what Author Rand presents is not so much capitalism as its hideous caricature. In fact, if her intention were to destroy faith in capitalism, she could not have...