Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s masterwork and the culmination of her career as a novelist. First published in 1957, the novel presents Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism through the story of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, industrialists struggling to keep their enterprises running in a world where the government increasingly punishes achievement and rewards mediocrity.

As the most talented and productive people in the country mysteriously begin to disappear, Dagny searches for the answer to the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Who is John Galt?’ The answer leads her to a hidden valley where the strikers have gathered, led by Galt himself, who has organized a strike of the mind against a society that demands self-sacrifice.

The novel weaves together mystery, romance, and philosophical argument into an epic narrative that spans the collapse of American industry and the rebuilding of a rational civilization. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read, Atlas Shrugged has sold more than seven million copies worldwide and remains one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.