Great review of Ayn Rand's writings by Jason Lee Steorts on National Review Online.
- http://www.nationalreview.com/...nd-jason-lee-steorts

Basically, he liked The Fountainhead because its characters were reflections of Rand's inner life, but disliked Atlas Shrugged because it expressed her perception of other people. I would tend to agree.

The Fountainhead is one of my all-time favorite novels; I've read it several times. It was a very challenging book for me when I read it in grad school, and actually helped to clarify for me the meaning of healthy self-love. I had been struggling with Christianity's message of loving self and others, and dealing with what we'd now call codependent tendencies. Ironically, it was the atheist, Rand, and her ideas about "rational self-interest" that were most helpful to me. I still think that's an important distinguishing feature between selfishness and healthy self-love, and have come to see that St. Thomas Aquinas says pretty much the same thing.

Atlas Shrugged was a whole other ballgame. My roommate at the time was a Rand fanatic, and in almost every serious discussion about anything, he'd end up, at some point, saying, "read Atlas Shrugged, it's all in there." So, eventually, I did -- or tried to (it's a hefty book). As Whittaker Chambers noted in his 1957 review of the book, "Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message." Everyone seemed so stereotyped and simplistic -- not real people at all. I didn't even like John Galt, the hero of the book, so I quit reading about halfway through and never picked it up again. Speech after speech after speech! It was too much . . . boring, really! The Fountainhead was much more interesting, the people more real, and the message more relevant to me; I even liked the movie with Gary Cooper.

Rand seems to be out of vogue these days, at least in comparison with the 60s and 70s, when I was cutting my philosophical and theological teeth. Too bad. She's a good one to bump your mind up against.