Atlas Shrugged - Reception

Reception

Atlas Shrugged debuted on The New York Times Bestseller List at #13 three days after its publication. It peaked at #3 on December 8, 1957, and was on the list for 22 consecutive weeks.

"Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of greed is good. Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out."

Atlas Shrugged was generally disliked by critics, despite being a popular success. The book was dismissed by some as "a homage to greed", while author Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly perfect in its immorality". Helen Beal Woodward, reviewing Atlas Shrugged for The Saturday Review, opined that the novel was written with "dazzling virtuosity" but that it was "shot through with hatred". This was echoed by Granville Hicks, writing for The New York Times Book Review, who also stated that the book was "written out of hate". The reviewer for Time magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman – in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?" In the magazine National Review, Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged "sophomoric" and "remarkably silly", and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term". Chambers argued against the novel's implicit endorsement of atheism, whereby "Randian man, like Marxian man is made the center of a godless world". Chambers also wrote that the implicit message of the novel is akin to "Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism" ("To a gas chamber — go!").

The negative reviews produced responses from some of Rand's admirers, including a letter by Alan Greenspan to The New York Times Book Review, in which he responded to Hicks' claim that "the book was written out of hate" by saying, "... Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should." Greenspan had read unpublished drafts of the work in Rand's salon at least three years earlier. In an unpublished letter to the National Review, Leonard Peikoff wrote, "... Mr. Chambers is an ex-Communist. He has attacked Atlas Shrugged in the best tradition of the Communists — by lies, smears, and cowardly misrepresentations. Mr. Chambers may have changed a few of his political views; he has not changed the method of intellectual analysis and evaluation of the Party to which he belonged."

Positive reviews appeared in a number of publications. Richard McLaughlin, reviewing the novel for The American Mercury, compared it to Uncle Tom's Cabin in importance. Well-known journalist and book reviewer John Chamberlain, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, found Atlas Shrugged satisfying on many levels: science fiction, a "Dostoevsky" detective story and, most importantly, a "profound political parable". However, Mimi Reisel Gladstein writes that reviewers who have "appreciated not only Rand's writing style but also her message" have been "far outweighed by those who have been everything from hysterically hostile to merely uncomprehending".

Former Rand friend, associate, business partner and lover Nathaniel Branden, to whom the book was originally dedicated, has had differing views of Atlas Shrugged in his life. He was initially quite favorable to it, praising it in the book he and Barbara Branden wrote in 1962 called Who is Ayn Rand? After he and Ayn Rand ended their relationship in 1968, both he and Barbara Branden repudiated their book in praise of Rand and her novels. As of 1971 though, in an interview he gave to "Reason" he listed some critiques, but concluded, "But what the hell, so there are a few things one can quarrel with in the book, so what? ATLAS SHRUGGED is the greatest novel that has ever been written, in my judgment, so let's let it go at that."

But years later, in 1984, two years after Rand's death, he argued that Atlas Shrugged "encourages emotional repression and self-disowning" and that her works contained contradictory messages. Branden claimed that the characters rarely talk "on a simple, human level without launching into philosophical sermons". He criticized the potential psychological impact of the novel, stating that John Galt's recommendation to respond to wrongdoing with "contempt and moral condemnation" clashes with the view of psychologists who say this only causes the wrongdoing to repeat itself. Rand herself, however, would not have regarded a novel as needing to portray such "ordinary" human interaction at all, even if an entire philosophy of life does need to address this.