By Jon Rappoport
When Ayn Rand exploded on the scene with her two massive novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), she was momentarily embraced by the political Right, until the discovery was made that she was an atheist. Her underlying philosophy of the primacy of the individual had nothing to do with religion.
Oops. There ensued an attack on her by William Buckley’s magazine, The National Review.
Despite the ever-burgeoning legion of Rand readers, the centers of political debate in this country excluded Rand and her ideas.
It didn’t matter that her dramatization of the individual versus the group was the deepest and most compelling in the history of American literature.