I think Rand ended up getting too full of herself. The Fountainhead is my favorite book of hers. By Atlas, she was dealing with a beautiful scope and marvelous characters, but she lost the willingness to really flesh her characters out. You get hints of moral contradiction and moral struggle, but that's it. Not like The Fountainhead, in which the hero and the villain are thoroughly explained.

Rand believed very firmly in her philosophy. Her fiction, however, is romanticized: Rand says that she portrays things not as they are, but as how she wishes they could be. It pains me when her "followers" take her black-and-white approach literally.

Yeah. But that's an exception to the rest of the book. I mean, good heavens, there's a mad scientist with a mustache who creates a death machine called Project Xylophone, there's a failing novelist named Balph Eubank, and a pirate is fraternizing with a coal miner. You can't look at that with any mindset other than "This is, above all, a fun read."