A short summary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Atlas Shrugged In Atlas Shrugged, the society’s leaders enact a series of laws and directives (the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, Mouch’s directives about the railroads of Colorado, Directive , etc.) that exercise increasingly arbitrary power Atlas Shrugged shows that rational thinking is mankind's survival instrument, just as the ability to fly is the survival tool for birds. In all of her major novels, Ayn Rand presents heroes and heroines who are brilliant thinkers opposed to either society's pressure to conform or a dictatorial government's commands to obey
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Atlas shrugged essay Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand. Rand's fourth and final novel, it was also her longestand the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing.
The theme of Atlas Shruggedas Rand described it, is "the role of man's mind in existence". The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism. In doing so, it expresses the advocacy of reason, individualism, and capitalism, and depicts what Rand saw to be the failures of governmental coercion. The book depicts a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations.
Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against "looters" who want to exploit their productivity. Dagny and Hank discover that a mysterious figure called John Galt is persuading other business leaders to abandon their companies and disappear as a strike of productive individuals against the looters.
The novel ends with the strikers planning to build a new capitalist society based on Galt's philosophy of reason and individualism. Atlas Shrugged atlas shrugged essay largely negative reviews after its publication, but achieved enduring popularity and ongoing sales in the following decades.
After several unsuccessful attempts to adapt the novel for film or television, atlas shrugged essay, a film trilogy based on it was released from to The book has also achieved currency among libertarian and conservative thinkers and politicians. 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. The US appears to be approaching an economic collapsewith widespread shortages, business failures, and decreased productivity.
Writer Edward Younkins said, "The story may be simultaneously described as anachronistic and timeless. The pattern of industrial organization appears to be that of the late s—the mood seems to be close to that of the depression-era s. Both the social customs and the level of technology remind one of the s", atlas shrugged essay. Dagny Taggartthe operating vice-president of Taggart Transcontinental railroad, keeps the company going amid a sustained economic depression.
As economic conditions worsen and government enforces statist controls on successful businesses, people are heard repeating the cryptic phrase "Who is John Galt? Her brother Jimthe railroad's president, seems to make irrational decisions, such as buying from Orren Boyle's unreliable Associated Steel. Dagny is also disappointed to discover that the Argentine billionaire Francisco d'Anconiaher childhood friend and first love, is risking his family's copper company by constructing the San Sebastián copper mineseven though Mexico will probably nationalize them.
Despite the risk, Jim and Boyle invest heavily in a railway for the region while ignoring the Rio Norte Line in Coloradowhere entrepreneur Ellis Wyatt has discovered large oil reserves. Mexico nationalizes the mines and railroad line, but the mines are discovered to be worthless. To recoup the railroad's losses, Jim influences the National Alliance of Railroads to prohibit competition in prosperous areas such as Colorado, atlas shrugged essay.
Wyatt demands that Dagny supply adequate rails to his wells before the ruling takes effect. In Philadelphiaself-made steel magnate Hank Rearden develops Rearden Metal, an alloy lighter and stronger than conventional steel. Dagny opts to use Rearden Metal in the Rio Norte Line, becoming the first major customer for the product. After Hank refuses to sell the metal to the State Science Institute, a government research foundation run by Dr.
Robert Stadlerthe Institute publishes a report condemning the metal without identifying problems with it, atlas shrugged essay. As a result, many significant organizations boycott the line. Although Stadler agrees with Dagny's complaints about the unscientific tone of the report, he refuses to override it.
To protect Taggart Transcontinental from the boycott, Dagny decides to build atlas shrugged essay Rio Norte Line as an independent company named the John Galt Line. Hank is unhappy with his manipulative wife Lillian, but feels obliged to stay with her.
He is attracted to Dagny, and when atlas shrugged essay joins her for the successful inauguration of the John Galt Line, they become lovers. On a vacation trip, Hank and Dagny discover an abandoned factory with an incomplete but revolutionary motor that runs on atmospheric static electricity. They begin searching for the inventor, and Dagny hires scientist Quentin Daniels to reconstruct the motor.
However, a series of economically harmful directives are issued by Wesley Moucha former Rearden lobbyist who betrayed Hank in return for a job leading a government agency. In response, Wyatt sets his wells on fire and disappears. Atlas shrugged essay other important business leaders have disappeared, leaving their industries to failure, atlas shrugged essay. From conversations with Francisco, Dagny and Hank realize he is hurting his copper company intentionally, atlas shrugged essay, although they do not understand why.
When the government imposes a directive that forbids employees from leaving their jobs and nationalizes all patents, Dagny violates the law by resigning in protest. To gain Hank's compliance, the government blackmails him with threats to publicize his affair with Dagny. After a major disaster in one of Taggart Transcontinental's tunnels, Dagny returns to work. On her return, she receives notice that Quentin Daniels is also quitting in protest, and she rushes across the country to convince him to atlas shrugged essay. On her way to Daniels, Dagny meets a hobo with a story that reveals the secret of the motor: it was invented and abandoned by an engineer named John Galt, who is the inspiration for the common saying.
When she chases after Daniels in a private plane, she crashes and discovers the secret behind the disappearances of business leaders: Galt is leading an organized strike of "the men of the mind" against a society that demands that they be sacrificed. She has crashed in their hiding place, an isolated valley known as Galt's Gulch. As she recovers from her injuries, she hears the strikers' explanations for the strike, and learns that the strikers include Francisco and many prominent people, such as her favorite composer, Richard Halley, and infamous pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld.
Dagny falls in love with Galt, who asks her to join the strike. Reluctant to abandon her railroad, Dagny leaves Galt's Gulch, but finds the government has devolved into dictatorship. Francisco atlas shrugged essay sabotaging his mines and quits. After he helps stop an armed takeover of Hank's steel mill, Francisco convinces Hank to join the strike. Galt follows Dagny to New York, where he hacks into a national radio broadcast to deliver a three-hour speech that explains the novel's theme and Rand's Objectivism.
Finally, Jim Taggart tries to torture Galt, but becomes delirious after realizing that the ever-incompetent government workers cannot even properly operate their electrical torture machine, while Galt is soon rescued by his partisans. The government collapses, and the novel closes as Galt announces that the way is clear for the strikers to rejoin the world.
Rand biographer Anne Heller traces the ideas which would go into Atlas Shrugged back to a never-written novel that the young Rand outlined when she was a student at the University of Petrograd. The story was set in a future in which the whole of Europe had become communist, and featured a beautiful, spirited American heiress luring the most talented Europeans to America to weaken the European communist regime.
The heiress would have had an assistant called Eddie Willersthe name of Dagny's assistant in Atlas Shrugged. The main difference from Atlas Shrugged was that while in Russia, Rand did not realize that America might have its own home-grown communists and socialists; therefore, atlas shrugged essay, in the book as finally written, atlas shrugged essay, talented people could not just cross the Atlantic, but needed to withdraw to an isolated valley.
Rand's stated atlas shrugged essay for writing the novel was "to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to the world without them". Rand replied, "What if I went atlas shrugged essay strike? What if all the creative minds of the world went on strike? Rand began the first draft of the novel on September 2, By the summer ofshe had written 18 chapters; [21] by Septembershe had written 21 chapters and was working on the last of the novel's three sections.
As Rand completed new chapters, she read them to a circle of young confidants who had begun gathering at her home to discuss philosophy. This group included Nathaniel Brandenhis wife Barbara BrandenBarbara's cousin Leonard Peikoffand economist Alan Greenspan. She spent more than two years completing the speech, finishing it on October 13, Atlas Shrugged was Rand's last completed work of fiction.
It marked a turning point in her life—the end of her career as a novelist and the beginning of her role as a popular philosopher. To depict the industrial setting of Atlas ShruggedRand conducted research on the American railroad and steel industries. She toured and inspected a number of industrial facilities, such as the Kaiser Steel plant, atlas shrugged essay, [28] visited facilities of the New York Central Railroad[29] [30] and even briefly operated a locomotive on the Twentieth Century Limited.
Robert Oppenheimerwhich influenced the character Robert Stadler and the novel's depiction of the development of "Project X". Rand's descriptions of Galt's Gulch were based on the town of Ouray, atlas shrugged essay, Coloradowhich Rand and her husband visited in when they were relocating from Los Angeles to New York.
For example, her portrayal of leftist intellectuals such as the characters Balph Eubank and Simon Pritchett was influenced by the college experiences of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, [33] and Alan Greenspan provided information on the economics of the steel industry.
Libertarian writer Justin Raimondo described similarities between Atlas Shrugged and Garet Garrett 's novel The Driverwhich 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. Bradford said Raimondo made an unconvincing comparison based on a coincidence of names and common literary devices.
Due to the success of Rand's novel The Fountainheadshe had no trouble attracting a publisher for Atlas Shrugged. This was a contrast to her previous novels, which she had struggled to place. Even before she began writing it, she had been approached atlas shrugged essay publishers interested in her next novel.
However, her contract for The Fountainhead gave the first option atlas shrugged essay its publisher, Atlas shrugged essay Company. After reviewing a partial manuscript, they asked her to discuss cuts and other changes. She refused, and Bobbs-Merrill rejected the book.
Hiram Hayden, an editor she liked who had left Bobbs-Merrill, asked her to consider his new employer, Random House. In an early discussion about the difficulties of publishing a controversial novel, Random House president Bennett Cerf proposed that Rand should atlas shrugged essay the manuscript to multiple publishers simultaneously and ask how they would respond to its ideas, so she could evaluate who might best promote her work. Rand atlas shrugged essay impressed by the bold suggestion and by her overall conversations with them.
After speaking with a few other publishers from about a dozen who were interested, Rand decided multiple atlas shrugged essay were not needed; she offered the manuscript to Random House. Upon reading the portion Rand submitted, Cerf declared it a "great book" and offered Rand a contract, atlas shrugged essay.
It was the first time Rand had worked with a publisher whose executives seemed enthusiastic about one of her books. Random House published the novel on October 10, The initial print run wascopies. The first paperback edition was published by New American Library in Julywith an initial run ofatlas shrugged essay, Dutton inwith an introduction by Rand's heir, Leonard Peikoff.
The working title of the novel was The Strikebut Rand thought this title would reveal the mystery element of the novel prematurely. With Rearden unable to answer, atlas shrugged essay, d'Anconia gives his own advice: "To shrug".
The novel is divided into three parts consisting of ten chapters each, atlas shrugged essay. Each part is named in honor of one of Aristotle 's laws of logic : "Non-Contradiction" after the law of noncontradiction ; "Either-Or", which is a reference to the law of excluded middle ; and "A Is A" in reference to the law of identity.
The story of Atlas Shrugged dramatically expresses Rand's ethical egoismher advocacy of " rational selfishness ", whereby all atlas shrugged essay the principal virtues and vices are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival or a failure to apply it : rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride.
Rand's characters often personify her view of the archetypes of various schools of philosophy for living and working in the world. Robert James Bidinotto wrote, "Rand rejected the literary convention that depth and plausibility demand characters who are naturalistic replicas of the kinds of people we meet in everyday life, uttering everyday dialogue and pursuing everyday values.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) Analyzed in One Minute: From Biography to Philosophy
, time: 1:53ATLAS SHRUGGED Essay Contest - Ayn Rand Institute Application Portal
“I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time this summer, and I stumbled on the essay contest as I was looking for resources to help me analyze the book. It was the perfect reason for me to take the time to engage with the ideas in the book and think about questions that matter. I put more thought-work into my essay than most of the essays I have ever written, and the process was Atlas Shrugged shows that rational thinking is mankind's survival instrument, just as the ability to fly is the survival tool for birds. In all of her major novels, Ayn Rand presents heroes and heroines who are brilliant thinkers opposed to either society's pressure to conform or a dictatorial government's commands to obey Atlas Shrugged is a trilogy of American science fiction drama films. The series, adaptations of Ayn Rand's novel of the same title, are subtitled Part I (), Part II () and Part III (); the latter sometimes includes Who Is John Galt?
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