It is not my usual fare. I typically summarize books that expose institutional capture, medical corruption, or the mechanisms by which official narratives diverge from observable reality. Atlas Shrugged is not that kind of book. It is a novel—a thousand-page philosophical novel published in 1957 about railroads and steel mills and a mysterious man who stops the motor of the world. It came up recently in conversation with a close friend, and I realized that despite its enormous cultural footprint, almost no one I know has actually read it. They know the name Ayn Rand. They have opinions about her. But they have not sat with the book itself.

This matters because Atlas Shrugged is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, particularly in American political and economic thought. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle. Silicon Valley founders cite her as formative. The book has sold more than ten million copies and consistently ranks in surveys as one of the most impactful books Americans have ever read. Yet the ratio of people who have opinions about Rand to people who have actually finished her major work is probably a hundred to one. The ratio of people who could accurately explain Objectivism—the philosophy the novel dramatizes—is smaller still. Most criticism of Rand attacks positions she did not hold, and most praise defends positions she would not recognize.

So I thought I would make a contribution to that deficit. What follows is not literary criticism or political endorsement. It is an attempt to lay out clearly what the book actually says—its characters, its plot, its philosophical arguments—so that anyone who wants to engage with these ideas can do so from a position of knowledge rather than secondhand caricature. Rand’s conclusions may be right or wrong, but they deserve to be understood before they are judged. This is my attempt at that understanding.

With thanks to Ayn Rand.