“The creation of John Galt was Ayn Rand’s life story,” said Shoshana Milgram, “and telling about it allowed me to spend time not only with the character she brought to life but with the process of dramatization.” To celebrate the 60th publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, we’re talking to the authors of chapters in Robert Mayhew’s book Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
“It always intrigued me that the great romantic writers are impassioned moralists who seek to change the world,” said Andrew Bernstein, the next author in our series celebrating the 60th publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. “Yet in their novels, these authors can only rarely imagine a way for their heroes to succeed.”
“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. . . . "
ARI invites you to our ninth annual Atlas Shrugged Revolution Dinner. Join guest of honor John Allison, ARI executive chairman Yaron Brook and ARI CEO Jim Brown as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, announce the 2017 Atlas Shrugged essay contest winner and launch the campaign for our latest initiative, the Campaign for the Moral Defense of Finance and Capitalism.
In this short course, philosopher Robert Mayhew presents Ayn Rand’s conception of humor and shows its connection to basic issues in Objectivism such as metaphysical value-judgments, the metaphysical versus the man-made, and the benevolent universe premise.
Last week, the Cato Institute hosted a theatrical reading of selected scenes from Ayn Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered. In the panel discussion that followed, ARI’s Onkar Ghate commented on several topics, including Ayn Rand’s development as a writer, the difference between teaching philosophy and dramatizing it in a novel, and the value of a plot that’s driven by conflicts between good people.
“Editing a live presentation for print publication is like translating from one language to another,” said Marlene Trollope, editor of Discovering Great Plays: As Literature and As Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff. “And, as the saying goes, ‘Something may be lost in translation.’ My challenge was to keep that loss to a minimum.”
