The ideas of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is known to millions for her blockbuster novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In the 1960s her Objectivist ideas, featuring esthetic romanticism, laissez-faire capitalism, atheism, and the virtue of selfishness, were promoted in an organized movement, which split apart after Rand's falling out with her protege Nathaniel Branden. This debacle threw Rand's growing community of followers into disarray, but she continues to attract readers and to exert a major, if largely subterranean, influence on thinking and policy. - Back cover.