Of course if readers aren’t familiar with Chambers, they won’t know who Hiss was. He was a Time magazine editor and confessed former Soviet Communist spy who became the principal witness against Alger Hiss when the latter was tried for espionage. Younger readers are apt not to know the name Whittaker Chambers. After all, he wrote, it “can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” He also called it “sophomoric” and “ridiculously silly.” He went on: “Randian man, like Marxian man, is made the center of a godless world.” Finally, he likened the message of Atlas Shrugged to “Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism: To a gas chamber go.”
Whittaker Chambers faced the problem when he went to write about Atlas Shrugged for National Review in December, 1959. By 2009 it was the #1 best-seller in Amazon’s category of fiction/literature.) By 1984 it had sold five million hardback copies. As fiction/literature (as Amazon does)? Fantasy/science fiction? Romance? What? More to the point, what to say about books that really aren’t worth reading even if they outsell the Bible? ( Atlas Shrugged spent twenty-two weeks on the New York Times best-seller list following its publication in 1957. It is nearly impossible even to classify them.
AYN RAND WAS AN AVOWED HOW TO
The question is how to write about the books.
They would otherwise not merit our attention. We shall do it for no reason except that the books have been read by millions and are influential to the point of guiding the actions of men of power in Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Having seen in Part One of this article something of the influence of Ayn Rand’s books and self-contrived philosophy of Objectivism, we want to conclude here with a look at the books themselves, in particular the two novels that have been read by millions, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
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