If your definition of a “modern classic” is a book which still sells briskly in both soft- and hard-cover editions a quarter-century after its publication, which deals with serious issues in a serious way, and which continues to stir up controversy as each succeeding generation discovers it, then—better brace yourself—Atlas Shrugged fills the bill. Sure, it’s a preposterous book; sure, the reviewers demolished it; sure, virtually every reputable conservative from Russell Kirk to Frank Meyer rushed to repudiate it. Indeed, there aren’t very many bad things to be said about Atlas Shrugged that aren’t true. No novel of comparable quality has ever been so tenacious in its hold on the public, give or take Gone with the Wind.
But . . . it’s there. Drop into your local K-Mart and you’ll find it on the book rack, probably next to Love’s Savage Fury or The Joy of Bestiality. Stop by a Waldenbooks outlet and you’ll find the giant hardbound version selling for a cool $18.95 (it cost $6.95 back in 1957), with the spruced-up paperback edition nestled comfortably among the classics (!) just around the corner. Time called it “weird,” Commonweal “cumbersome” and “lumbering,” the New York Times “a book . . . written out of hate.” All true; and all, it would seem, beside the point. Each and every year, year in and year out, New American Library orders up another fifty thousand or so paperbound copies—and they sell. Rumor has it that Ayn Rand herself was, at the time of her death, hot at work on the script for a ten-hour Atlas Shrugged TV mini-series; and it’s no rumor that she turned up on the Phil Donahue show a while back, putting down altruistic housewives right and left with a verbal sledgehammer, the very picture of her beloved “intransigence.” (Ayn Rand liked intransigence like Norman Mailer likes existentialism.) And this has been going on, mind you, for 25 years.
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