| | When in high school in the late 1940's I came across "Generation of Vipers" by Philip Wylie, an iconoclast who is best known for his diatribes on "momism" and apple pie. Bear in mind the era when this was a best seller, and my age at the time. This was when the only aspiration for a young woman was to be a nurse, telephone operator, teacher, secretary, librarian and a few others. That anyone could have the chutzpah to challenge a lot of these ideas was an eye-opener for me and led the way for me to be open to Rand in the '70s. I happened across a copy of it in a used bookstore a few years back and found it so stale and dated that it wasn't really of any interest to me anymore, but it had done the job that it was destined to do.
From the review, below:
He was a successful screenwriter and novelist, specializing in science fiction. His two best-known novels, both published in the 1930s, are "When Worlds Collide" and "Gladiator"; the latter is commonly understood to have been a main influence on the Superman comic books, which shared Wylie's admiration for the superior being in a world of weak mediocrities. He worked away at fiction and nonfiction until his death in 1970, but though several of his novels are still in print and read by sci-fi enthusiasts, it is for "Generation of Vipers" that he is best known. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072902124.html
Sam
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