Ayn Rand’s ideas have become so polarized and politicized that few people seem capable of appreciating her fiction on its own literary terms. It’s rare to come across an honest dialogue between two highly educated, rational and open-minded people about Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as simply a novel.
Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins did just that in a fascinating and surprising dialogue, which I only recently discovered. Often illuminating and with fresh insights free from most conventional views of Rand and her magnum opus, their conversation is worth highlighting on the Prometheus Blog in order to bring it to the attention of LFS members and a wider group of readers.
“We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we’re going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century,” Oliver said in introducing their conversation on his Common Reader blog at common reader.co.uk.
Their wide-ranging discussion centered on Atlas Shrugged “in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand’s greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology.”
A former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI, Robbins was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature. Notably, he read Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before he read Dickens, Melville, Jane Austen or Harriet Beecher Stowe and thus describes Rand’s novels as “foundational novels” for him.
By contrast, Oliver, 38 at the time of the 2025 interview, had not read Rand at all until recently. She had little reason to, she explained, based on what others told her.
“For my whole life, people have said, “Oh, that’s really a bad book. That’s so badly written. That book is no good.” The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun,” Oliver told Robbins.
A BILDUNGSROMAN?
Robbins, meanwhile, describes Atlas Shrugged as “not quite a bildungsroman.”
“ It is in some ways the story of her (Dagny Taggart, a young woman and the operations person for Taggart Transcontinental Railroad)… coming to the realization of how the world works,” Robbins said.
“It’s also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she’s creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she’s like, “What is going on?’”
Robbins also noticed the many uncanny ways in which Atlas Shrugged anticipated the long-term political, social and economic consequences if collectivism and statism continued to change America.
“Free speech, all these topics, energy production… We’re seeing this in the headlines,” Robbins said. “When I was reading this book, I was like, “Oh my God, how did she know?”
Their discussion encompasses probing critiques of other stereotyped views about Rand from both Left and Right, and explores the feminist view of Rand.
A MODERN HEROINE
They also discuss how modern is Dagny Taggart, strikingly coming across as “one of the new women” of the novel’s 1950s-era.
“I’ve read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman,” Henry said.
“No, this is not Cheever,” Hollis said. “This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the ’50s are taught, certainly in America, it’s like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that.”
Among their other provocative insights and comments:
* Despite Rand’s avowed atheism, Atlas Shrugged is a “very Protestant” book… “a Weberian Protestant.”
* Atlas Shrugged is in many ways in the spirit of some of the greatest 18th and 19th century novels – and they agree that Dagny is close to Dorothea from George Eliot’s classic novel Middlemarch.
They also compare Rand favorably to Jane Austen and the Brontes, especially regarding her treatment of her central male-female relationship.
“One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together,” Henry said.
“They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them,” Henry said.
AN ETHOS OF EXCELLENCE
Perhaps most intriguingly, rather than stereotyping and dismissing Rand’s philosophy as one advocating selfishness or blindly pursuing greedy profits at the expense of others, they respond positively to Atlas Shrugged as a healthy and attractive vision focusing on an ethos of personal excellence.
“We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That’s what Rand is saying. She’s saying, actually, it’s not about earning money, it’s not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life,” Robbins said.
“It’s about the pursuit of excellence. It’s about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they’re in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?”
The Common Reader interview was titled “Is Ayn Rand the New Vibe?”
Read in retrospect in mid-2026, that seems too trendy.
Rand’s ideas, and her fiction, do continue to be major bestsellers four decades after her death – no mean feat, given that even bestselling authors and books tend to fade away over time. But Rand is clearly not the “new vibe” – at least, not yet, not when her fiction is so misunderstood and her philosophy remains so radical – in the original Greek sense of that word, referring to what’s most fundamental about reality and life.
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