| | Congratulations, Ed! I confess that I am not much for fiction, myself.
I got through most of my literature classes with Classics Illustrated comics. What I did read was mostly science fiction, and of that, I kept to the mainstream: Asimov, Heinlein, some Philip K. Dick, and then a string of cyberpunk in the 90s. But along the way, on my own, I did read The Call of the Wild, The Bridges of Madison County, and The Sun Also Rises. I also read The Odyssey and the Iliad (out of sequence, there), the first in the Cambridge dual-language and the the other just the Modern Library edition.
Just to say, I appreciate your predicament. As compelling as Rand's non-fiction is, she developed it in order to write stories about people. Her ideas about life, the universe and everything, are dramatic; and therefore they are best delivered via drama.
The scene in Anthem where he brings the light to the council and they reject it and punish him for it is previewed thematically in some scenes of We the Living, but gets ever more focus and expression in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged of course.
That is critical to understanding her view of capitalism. It reflects some of what von Mises attempted to dissect in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. The constant thread of what is commonly called "Nietzschean" in her philosophy is the unspoken dichotomy between her affinity for the potential of the common person and her contempt for those same common persons as a collective. That person will move into a home that has electricity, but that person would not electrify their home. It is a cliche that if you invent a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. It could happen; people do recognize their own interests sometimes. Mostly, a better mousetrap enables you to eat more mice because no one else wants it.
Atlas Shrugged could run another 1100 pages and she would never have identified the essential character: the salesman. In many ways, she accepted Arthur Miller's Willie Loman. Her capitalism lacks middlemen. Grocers and hardware stores about the limit of her scope. Like her heroes Equality 7-2521, Howard Roark, and the home team of Atlas, she expected that a better idea, product, or service, would sell itself directly to those with the intelligence to know an improvement in their own lives. She apparently did not see the difference between describing a thing and explaining to someone else the value to them in it.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 6/27, 2:53am)
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