![]() ![]() While I found Anthem intriguing and the ending dramatic – the book’s hero and heroine discover old books with the words I and ego, completely overturning their worldview – it would play a more important role as a gateway book to Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged, which I read years later along with The Fountainhead.Īlthough I had become a voracious reader by then, I’d never been so profoundly inspired by a book as I was by Atlas Shrugged. ![]() And while English was about my least favorite subject, I was a big fan of science fiction and had no trouble digesting Anthem in short order. The novella is a lot like Idiocracy - Mike Judge’s dystopian comedy about the dumbing down of society – except without the humor. You might call it an Orwellian society, but the book preceded 1984 by more than a decade, so it was quite controversial in its time. Individuality is a thing of the past, and the word I has been eliminated from the language. Way back in the 70s she had our class read a short novella called Anthem by Ayn Rand.Īnthem is a dark story set in a future world where everyone is an indistinguishable member of a social collective. Greenfield, a middle-aged woman whose idea of a good time was to curl up in bed with a good book and a cup of hot chocolate. “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” – Ayn Randīrooklyn’s Lincoln High School had an English teacher named Mrs. ![]()
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