“A surprising favorite among the high-school taste-makers is Ayn Rand’s Anthem. “ Anthem is a short novel, but for the young reader it offers exciting action, an appealing love story, and an interesting political philosophy.” -Tamara Stadnychenko, English Journal
Once there, we hope the lessons imparted will stay with you as long as they have stayed with us after closing its covers, for we’ve found Ruth Alexander’s summation to be spot-on: “You will think,” indeed.
That the tomes The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would soon follow should come as no surprise once you arrive at the end of this brisk tale. Additionally, we’ve kept the footnotes to a bare minimum, only adding them where we thought they were necessary.Īdmittedly, we’re quite pleased that our editing can take a backseat to this story, because what a story it is! Rand was a firebrand, and when one considers this book in her chronology, one can surely see that she was only beginning to fan the flames of her Objectivism here. As for the text itself, we have hewed as closely as possible to Rand’s 1946 version that she revised for its first American publication. We have updated some hyphened words to reflect their modern usage, swapped a British spelling or two for their American equivalents, and corrected a couple of punctuation errors that we discovered in the original text. It presents a dystopian future in which totalitarian collectivism has triumphed to such an extent that even the word “I” has been forgotten and replaced with “We,” and where men are put to death for the crime of discovering and speaking the “unspeakable word,” until one young man, Equality 7-2521, vows to illuminate the Collective darkness and write the first chapter in the new history of man.Ĭonsidering the short length of this novella, there wasn’t a lot for, ahem, we Heathens to edit. In the 30s, as a warning to Western civilization about the horrors of collectivism, she penned Anthem, which was published in England but initially refused publication in America, for reasons the reader will soon discover. Born in Russia, and educated during the Russian Revolution, she experienced firsthand the horrors of Communism in action and, yearning to escape, emigrated to the United States in 1926. The tenets of which are espoused in all of her writings, but especially in her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was the pen name of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a Russian-American writer and philosopher known for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism.
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