The Stamp of Greatness

[This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on April 22.]

At a ceremony in New York City today (Thursday, April 22nd), the Post Office will unveil its new stamp honoring Ayn Rand, author of the classic American novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. It's a great tribute to this best-selling author whose works have changed the lives of millions. And it's a great irony as well: The stamp marks her admission to the American cultural Establishment that this Russian-born iconoclast spent most of her life disparaging.

The stamp is the 16th to be issued in the literary arts collection, putting Rand in the select company of William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Professors of literature have always looked down their noses at Rand as a pop author whose idealistic novels were of interest only to teenagers. Despite this prejudice, however, books have been pouring out from academic and commercial publishers on every aspect of her achievement — the literary craft of her fiction, her philosophical ideas, her theory of art, her controversial relationship with feminism — reflecting the new respect she has won as a writer and thinker.

The media have noticed the rising curve of Rand's reputation, and sent it higher, with recent articles about her work and the movement she launched. Our database at the Institute for Objectivist Studies contains hundreds of published references to Rand in recent years, everything from major stories to casual allusions to her characters.

Meanwhile, her books continue to sell at the astonishing pace of 300,000 copies a year — forty years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, her last novel. Several years ago, the Book-of-the-Month Club surveyed its members about the books that had had the greatest impact on their lives. Atlas Shrugged was mentioned more often than any other work except the Bible. Volleyball champion Gabrielle Reece spoke for millions when she said, "reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged taught me to stick up for my values, no matter what the price."

What is the source of this enduring success? For my money, the explanation is simple. Rand struck an individualistic chord deep in the American soul. As Stephen Cox, a professor of literature at the University of California, said of The Fountainhead, "the romantic individualism of the novel is like DNA; it's present in every cell, and it controls every cell."

America was born two centuries ago in the age of Enlightenment, and its culture has always reflected the values of that era. Americans love reason, science, technology, know-how. They respect achievement and success of every kind. Above all, they share the spirit of individualism, the "don't tread on me" insistence on the freedom to follow one's own star and to challenge received wisdom.

Our intellectuals and artists have abandoned the ideals of Enlightenment individualism, but those values still flourish in American life: in the generations who headed west in search of opportunity, in the booming fortunes of high-tech entrepreneurs, in the frontier ferment of the Internet, in the quiet dedication with which parents teach their children that the world is theirs to conquer.

Rand was not the only author who mined this vein of American individualism, but she was its greatest voice in our era. The characters she created are memorable as men and women of the mind, as producers, and as individualists of towering initiative and integrity, values they embody in a purer, more intense form than we see in everyday life.

The Fountainhead, Rand's first commercial success, is the story of Howard Roark, the brilliant architect who insists on the right to pursue "my work, done my way," and of the second-hand souls who envy, hate, and try to destroy him. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, translates the ethic of individualism into a vast political epic about what happens when "the men of the mind," the producers who carry the world on their shoulders, go on strike against the expropriation of their wealth by a society that demands they serve others.

While Rand earned popularity as a writer because she gave dramatic voice to individualism, she earned notoriety because she spelled out the implications of that principle with ruthless consistency. If the individual has the right to pursue his own happiness, she argued, then we must reject the conventional ethic that sees self-sacrifice and service to others as the noblest acts. "Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give," said Howard Roark. "Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary." We are not our brother's keeper, because an
honorable person does not wish to be kept.

Rand was an uncompromising advocate of laissez-faire capitalism — not just as an efficient economic engine, but as a social system that allows and rewards the best in human nature: rationality, productive achievement, individual autonomy, and the treatment of individuals as ends in themselves. Conversely, she regarded socialism — and its more timid cousin, the welfare state — not just as inefficient but as immoral, because they treat individuals as means to an amorphous social good.

Rand was a girl of twelve when the Russian Revolution erupted in St. Petersberg, where she grew up. She witnessed first-hand the bloodshed and terror that resulted from Lenin's attempt to enforce communal solidarity and spread the wealth. "Whoever claims the 'right' to 'redistribute' the wealth produced by others," she wrote, "is claiming the 'right' to treat human beings as chattel."

Rand's vision of individualism remains controversial, of course. But the scope of her vision and the enduring novels that embody it are now achieving the recognition they deserve. Her face, with the stamp of greatness on her brow, will soon adorn letters across the width and breadth of the adopted country she loved.