Why do people love atlas shrugged

Born into a Jewish family called Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, she was just 12 when she witnessed her father's pharmacy being seized by the Bolsheviks. She never forgot that injustice and humiliation, says Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, even when she arrived in the US eight years later.

Her novel, The Fountainhead, about an architect, was a word-of-mouth success and made into a film starring Gary Cooper. It drew a committed group of supporters to Rand, some of whom gathered every Saturday at her New York apartment to read extracts from her next book.

Among them was an economic forecaster called Alan Greenspan, who became her close friend and eventually chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Despite this dedicated following, reviews of Atlas Shrugged in were not favourable, and its message united both left and right in condemnation. Gore Vidal described it as "almost perfect in its immorality". But this didn't stop it from becoming an international bestseller, as millions were drawn to her central message of individualism and unfettered capitalism, even if they didn't buy into her whole philosophy.

And more than 50 years after publication, sales are booming. According to Nielsen BookScan, more than , copies were sold in the US in , pushing sales for all her works past the half-million mark that year.

The extent of her influence was demonstrated this week when Paul Ryan joined the Mitt Romney ticket, although he has now distanced himself from her work.

In , Ryan told the Atlas Society how Rand "taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are". But earlier this year, he told the National Review that as a Catholic he rejected her atheism. Beyond politics, the novel also had an impact in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs identified with its emphasis on heroic individuals and their work ethic.

The first is its treatment of human potential. Atlas Shrugged is a brilliant exposition of the things that are made possible by the rational, thinking human mind. A lot of things that we take for granted are the product of free markets harnessing the power of free minds.

Something as mundane as a hot cup of coffee, for example, embodies innumerable decisions by innumerable people, each with their own specialized knowledge. We see what happens throughout the book when people are unshackled and allowed to pursue their own goals.

Production increases. Lives are saved. Life is meaningful. The second reason is its exploration of how a society disintegrates when we deny human nature.

The great tragedy I see throughout Atlas is the tragedy of what might have been. The producers are destroyed, and their destroyers continue to be oblivious to their destruction. One of the most important principles in economics is that we rarely if ever take account of the unseen, unintended consequences of policies and actions.

In several places throughout the book, Rand explores how an "emergency directive" to help someone in one part of the country leads to the ruin or suicide of a bankrupt entrepreneur in another part of the country. The book is an extended lesson in what happens when we focus only on what we see. Atlas Shrugged confronts its reader with a difficult and uncomfortable set of moral questions. Production is the outpouring of the human mind. There are countless tedious repetitions of ideas, phrases and situations.

Rand's world is a place of black and white morality, good and bad people and absolutely no shades of grey. Consequently, none of the characters or storylines are at all believable. To top all that off, the writing is turned up to eleven throughout. It is, as Whittaker Chambers noted in this justly celebrated article in the National Review, a work of "shrillness without reprieve". It's also, as millions have discovered before me, strangely compelling. Rand may be shrill, but the high-pitched urgency of her writing and uncomplicated morality also gives the book an irresistible force.

It might take pages too many to properly reveal the workings of John Galt, but it's an intriguing mystery. The conclusion might also be postponed in more than a dozen annoying ways, but Rand has a unique ability to bludgeon you along to it.

I hated the thing, but I couldn't put it down. It was worth the effort too, because the conclusion is one of the funniest things I've read. This mad denouement boasted, among other idiotic delights, a particle destroyer, a mad electric torture machine, gratuitous nudity, a laboratory, and a man who introduces himself in the heat of battle in all seriousness as "Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia".

Such laughs, however, come bitterly, given how seriously so many take this stuff.