24 Facts About Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance, and it contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.

Atlas Shrugged initially received largely negative reviews, but achieved enduring popularity and ongoing sales in the following decades.

Atlas Shrugged is set in a dystopian United States at an unspecified time, in which the country has a "National Legislature" instead of Congress and a "Head of State" instead of a President.

Atlas Shrugged is attracted to Dagny, and when he joins her for the inauguration of the John Galt Line, they become lovers.

Atlas Shrugged's has crashed in their hiding place, an isolated valley known as Galt's Gulch.

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Atlas Shrugged's initially thought it would be easy to write and completed quickly, but as she considered the complexity of the philosophical issues she wanted to address, she realized it would take longer.

Rand biographer Anne Heller traces some ideas that would go into Atlas Shrugged back to a never-written novel that Rand outlined when she was a student at Petrograd State University.

Atlas Shrugged's toured and inspected a number of industrial facilities, such as the Kaiser Steel plant, visited facilities of the New York Central Railroad, and briefly operated a locomotive on the Twentieth Century Limited.

Libertarian writer Justin Raimondo described similarities between Atlas Shrugged and Garet Garrett's 1922 novel The Driver, which is about an idealized industrialist named Henry Galt, who is a transcontinental railway owner trying to improve the world and fighting against government and socialism.

Atlas Shrugged's was pleased when her husband suggested Atlas Shrugged, previously the title of a single chapter, for the book.

Each chapter has a title; Atlas Shrugged is the only one of Rand's novels to use chapter titles.

Story of Atlas Shrugged dramatically expresses Rand's ethical egoism, her advocacy of "rational selfishness", whereby all of the principal virtues and vices are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival : rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride.

The action in Atlas Shrugged takes place at a time when society has reached the stage of dictatorship.

Technological progress and intellectual breakthroughs in scientific theory appear in Atlas Shrugged, leading some observers to classify it in the genre of science fiction.

Atlas Shrugged debuted at number 13 on The New York Times Best Seller list three days after its publication.

Atlas Shrugged drew a comparison with the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, saying that a "skillful polemicist" did not need a refined literary style to have a political impact.

The 2018 PBS Great American Read television series found Atlas Shrugged rated number 20 out of 100 novels, based on a YouGov survey "asking Americans to name their most-loved novel".

The title of one libertarian magazine, Reason: Free Minds, Free Markets, is taken from John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, who argues that "a free mind and a free market are corollaries".

Atlas Shrugged was initially quite favorable to it, and even after he and Rand ended their relationship, he still referred to it in an interview as "the greatest novel that has ever been written", although he found "a few things one can quarrel with in the book".

However, in 1984 he argued that Atlas Shrugged "encourages emotional repression and self-disowning" and that Rand's works contained contradictory messages.

Atlas Shrugged criticized the potential psychological impact of the novel, stating that Galt's recommendation to respond to wrongdoing with "contempt and moral condemnation" clashes with the view of psychologists who say this only causes the wrongdoing to repeat itself.

In 2005, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan said that Rand was "the reason I got into public service", and he required his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged, although in 2012 he said his supposed devotion to Rand was "an urban legend".

References to Atlas Shrugged have appeared in a variety of other popular entertainments.

Atlas Shrugged was a finalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1958, but lost to The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.