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.”