How big is Rands comeback?
She has always had a strong libertarian following in the US, but her magnum opus, the 1,088-page Atlas Shrugged, has enjoyed a big surge in sales since the start of the financial crisis. It sold 200,000 copies in the US in 2008; this year it’s selling at its fastest rate since first published in 1957. Sales have spiked, says the Economist, whenever the US government has tried to prop up the economy: during the sub-prime crisis, last October’s bank bailouts and the passing of Obama’s economic stimulus package. In January the book reached 33 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list, briefly surpassing Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. It is now at number 20, four places above Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The Rights of Man. What happens in Atlas Shrugged? Rand’s fourth novel describes a dystopian United States in which industrialists and the rest of America’s “producers” – oppressed by government regulation – are persuaded by the novel’s hero, charismatic inventor John Galt, to forsake the world of
