CHAPTER 1

Calm Before the Clue

There once was an Age of Reason, but we’ve progressed beyond it. This is the Age of Love.[1]

The post-war decade of the 1950s existed in a curious state. People lived the American dream by recovering in the suburbs, with backyard barbeques and the maiden era of television culture providing the new symbols of a comfortable middle class. Although some citizens viewed the rise of rock ’n’ roll and its subculture as a sign of unrest, American Bandstand hardly bore a national threat. Elvis, perhaps, a little more so. The beatniks’ subculture primarily contained non-conformity; New York City, particularly the quarter of Greenwich Village and Café Wha?, confined the non-conformity. Most American women chose lives centered on traditional roles and stretched their time around the many activities of the full-time wife and mother.

But, alas, in this apparently bucolic state of American life, when even cigarettes were an innocent habit, one post-war residue added a surreal overhang. As families tuned into Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy, they calmly acquiesced to a culture that included bomb shelters and air raid drills. Lawrence Welk and imminent Armageddon. Leave it to Beaver and the Cold War. The two channels coexisted with few qualms. The children of the suburbs practiced nuclear survival on cue by heading into the grammar school hallways at the sound of a specific siren. Their young imaginations may have wondered if they had a better shot at surviving an attack if not sitting directly across from the classroom’s open door, but they also effortlessly resumed their pre-drill states of mind and eagerness for the next break, recess.

Ferment brewed in the minds of restive artistic souls who could not find identities in a world of sitcoms, rock ’n’ roll, and atomic annihilation. Something had to give.

And indeed, challenges to this pastiche of serenity and fatalism arrived in the form of two novels published toward the end of the decade.

Literary Detonations

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, both published in 1957, arrived as two of the most unexpected and disruptive works in the pantheon of modern fiction. Although each novel’s narrative portrayed a severe break with the status quo, the apparent similarities between these two divergent novels could be found only in transportation themes and plotlines driven by remarkably adventurous protagonists.

Jack Kerouac, maestro of improvisational prose, invented the crazed cross-country road trip that required only enough money for booze, speed, and gas to keep him and his charismatic sidekicks bumping along. But their excursion was not just a tour of the countryside. Dean Moriarty and his brethren, based on Jack’s real-life pals Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, were searching for God—or something—while speeding through incidents of no consequence. Today the book, probably still a bestseller at City Lights in San Francisco, lives on as one of the signature American period novels. On the Road might be viewed as the opening salvo for the massive road trip of the 1960s, when a large generational segment abandoned conventional itineraries and customary sexual mores.

Atlas Shrugged, the other breakout novel of 1957, received a frosty reception from the New York critics, especially from one of the doyens, William Buckley, founder of the journal National Review and the television program Firing Line. He infamously summed up Rand's novel as a “remarkably silly book” and could recall “no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained.”2 Buckley also assigned ex-communist Whittaker Chambers to pen the formal review in National Review.[3]

These malicious quips  and others from the literary establishment left Ayn Rand chagrined. But as the publishing industry soon learned, word-of-mouth recommendations overrode the chilly New York reception. Sales of Atlas Shrugged began to swell throughout the nation’s bookstores, eventually breaking into the international readership and many translations. The Ayn Rand Institute reports that more than 10,000,000 copies have now been sold. (see Figure 1.1). New readers in every generation are drawn to an experience that endorses achievement in a meaningful life.

All of Rand’s novels are constructed upon her philosophical tenets of choosing freedom over communism, capitalism over centralized economies, reason over mysticism, and ownership over political control. Her protagonists subscribe to the favored philosophy,; her antagonists do not. Each set of characters embodies principles that drive the plotline toward the inevitable consequences of their belief systems.

Rand brilliantly conveys philosophy through dialogue and scenarios, providing far more edifying impact than a pedantic lecture. Values and principles become visible through action and outcomes, although Atlas Shrugged is not without pedagogical inserts and discourses. Characters in the novel do sometimes become orators. John Galt’s sixty-page speech may qualify as the lengthiest tutorial in any work of fiction, but Ayn Rand would not permit Random House to edit a single word. Bennett Cerf, then head of the publishing giant, defended his uncompromising author, and “Galt’s Speech” survived uncut. Readers who complete the book's 1,168 pages will find important philosophical choices articulated for their own decisions.

After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s work was primarily directed toward the teaching of her Philosophy of Objectivism, summarized as:

“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.”[4]

Despite Rand’s numerous nonfiction books and essays on the topic, Objectivism has not gained wide intellectual traction. Her two main works of fiction, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, have sanctified the values of individualism and entrepreneurship, now synonymous with the spirit of the United States of America. Amazingly, in a nation formed on the principles of liberty, Rand remains one of the few intellectuals to fiercely defend the morality of an economic system based on free markets and voluntary participation versus centralized planning and coercive enforcement. But one can find many quiet fans of Rand in leadership positions of the private sector, on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere.

A Second Dissertation and Decryption

In the sixty-plus years since publication of Atlas Shrugged, the values espoused by the novel have been parsed and argued by a cottage industry of critics, organizations, and conferences that have generated countless books and commentaries. I unexpectedly joined their ranks after tripping over an anomaly in the novel.

During my years in graduate school in the latter half of the non-digital 1980s, I still enjoyed reading lengthy novels as my relaxation at the end of the day. Little did I know that during my evening respite away from the chemistry laboratory, I would stumble on a “chemical” clue that would open a literary rabbit hole. I gradually came to realize that I had discovered never-before-reported data in Atlas Shrugged. It pointed to a new revelation about the novel’s interpretation.

My initial observation begot decades of detective work, as a significant pattern of symbols emerged from the complex, tightly woven novel. These observations became a background obsession in my life, as I labored alone to crack Rand’s buried metaphor. Finally, the two critical clues fell into place, and I understood Atlas Shrugged, for the first time.

The book in hand, Atlas Decrypted tells the detective story that eventually solved an equation, not a crime. And, it is a very particular equation, one that Rand enshrines as the internal engine within Atlas Shrugged. Yes, this is a bold claim. To prove my thesis, I am using the only method I trust: the scientific method. Deciphering the clues and writing this book eventually became a second dissertation; one that began in parallel with my formal chemistry dissertation but stretched on for decades.

Skeptics have maintained that nothing remains to be discovered within the vault of Atlas Shrugged.

My data suggests otherwise.