Ayn Rand’s massive work Atlas Shrugged turns 50 this year and the editorials are starting the flow in. The best so far has been from, ironically, the former editor of National Review, Maggie Gallagher. Included in the editorial is one of the best descriptions of why Rand continues to appeal after all of these years:
The key to Ayn Rand is that she pictured America largely from early films from Hollywood. As a young girl growing up in the grim world of communist Russia, she saw America as we dreamed ourselves to be, and she longed her whole life with a child’s intensity to make this vision real, to live in it. We respond to her novels because they offer us one deep strand of American self-identity – as individualists, yes, but individualists who together dream big dreams, conquer wild frontiers, invent the future, remake our very selves.