Since its publication in 1957, Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged has sold over 10 million copies and has been translated into 30 different languages. Reviews and reactions to it have always varied widely in the extreme. Well-known and respected literary critics, authors, professors, and politicians have attacked it savagely, but just as many have praised it without reservation, some even calling it the greatest novel ever written. It has the distinction of increasing sales every decade since publication—as recently as 2009 it sold 500,000 copies for the year. As of 2023, an online search for signed copies of the first edition brings up copies for “only” $3,400 or as much as $145,000 for a copy inscribed to Ludwig von Mises, the famed and very influential libertarian economist.

Atlas Shrugged is on the Required Reading List for the Human Race in the Scholar’s Library of 101 Bananas.

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Love is a command to rise to one’s highest potential, the best and noblest vision of ourself. Love is a reward, the greatest we can earn, granted to us for the moral qualities we have achieved in our life.
       —Ayn Rand, from the movie The Passion of Ayn Rand

America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
       —Ayn Rand