In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, heroine Dagny Taggart fights to save her transcontinental railroad from collapse. Dagny's efforts prompt her to seek out the man who stopped the motor of the world and to hunt down the destroyer who's leading a strike of the great minds. She finds both in the person of John Galt, who asserts that the first right of human beings is the freedom to think and act independently.

World War II, and support for national socialism dwindled in the United States as a result. But communism, in the form of Marxist political ideology, survived World War II in the United States. Many American professors, writers, journalists, and politicians continued to advocate Marxist principles. When Ayn Rand was writing Atlas Shrugged, many Americans strongly believed that the government should have the power to coercively redistribute income and to regulate private industry. The capitalist system of political and economic freedom was consistently attacked by socialists and welfare statists. The belief that an individual has a right to live his own life was replaced, to a significant extent, by the collectivist idea that individuals must work and live in service to other people. Individual rights and political freedom were threatened in American politics, education, and culture.

Also in the mid-1980s, the Ayn Rand Society — an organization of professional philosophers devoted to studying and teaching her theories — was founded within the American Philosophical Association. ...  Ayn Rand's ideas — and Atlas Shrugged, her greatest book and primary means of communicating those ideas — are an enduring part of American intellectual culture.

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations tells the story of Pip, an English orphan who rises to wealth, deserts his true friends, and becomes humbled by his own arrogance. It also introduces one of the more colorful characters in literature: Miss Havasham. Charles Dickens set Great Expectations during the time that England was becoming a wealthy world power. Machines were making factories more productive, yet people lived in awful conditions, and such themes carry into the story.

Edward Albee's dramatic play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is a tense look into the volatile marriage of George and Martha, whose lives are full of anger and illusion. During an evening of heavy drinking, party guests Nick and Honey get caught up in George and Martha's strange games and the death of their "son." Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play.