Discussion Topics

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What are the physical and other characteristics, such as names and professions, of Ayn Rand’s sympathetic and unsympathetic characters? What purpose does she have in giving them these particular features?

How does Rand’s admiration for human beings as builders and creators show up in her fiction?

Rand’s novels often have long speeches by the characters justifying their actions. What purpose is served by these speeches?

Rand said that her purpose in fiction is to set forth a moral ideal. How do her heroes and their actions reflect a moral ideal?

How does Rand use her novels to contrast the values of individualism and collectivism?

How does Rand criticize prevalent social trends?

Other literary forms

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In addition to her three novels and one novelette, Ayn Rand published a play and several philosophical disquisitions. An early critique, Hollywood: American Movie City, was published in the Soviet Union in 1926 without Rand’s permission.

Achievements

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Ayn Rand won the Volpe Cup at the Venice Film Festival in 1942 for the Italian motion-picture dramatization of We the Living, a novel about the failures of the Soviet system. She was awarded an honorary degree, a doctor of humane letters, by Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in 1963, but this sole award does not reflect the significance of her influence on America’s philosophical and political economic thought.

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