Customer Reviews

Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem

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I was impressed by the scholarship of this volume. Each essay was rich with fresh angles, new insights, and interesting asides into Ayn Rand, Anthem, and Rand's philosophy. I also learned a lot from the philosophical essays, particularly Onkar Ghate's essay on free will and determinism, Greg Salmieri's essay on individualism and the concept "I", and Darryl Wright's essay on the psyche in Rand's early thought. Each of these authors makes a number of interesting and illuminating philosophical points that--to my knowledge--have not been addressed anywhere else in the literature.

Overall, highly recommended.

Most recent literary criticism cannot be read for pleasure. It's pretentious, muddle-headed, even corrupt, spouting the poisonous dogma that your mind can't see facts, all it sees is warped by "class, race, and gender." (Then how can they claim that as fact?)

This book is a welcome exception.

It's a clear, straightforward, helpful and ultimately fascinating look at Ayn Rand's second masterpiece, written by noted scholars. Here are just some of the contents:

"Anthem" in Manuscript: Finding the Words, by Shoshana Milgram

"Anthem:" '38 and '46, by Robert Mayhew

"Anthem" and "The Individualist Manifesto," by Jeff Britting

"Anthem as a Psychological Fantasy, by Tore Boeckmann

"Anthem" in the Context of Related Literary Works: "We Are Not Like Our Brothers," by Shoshana Milgram

Sacrilege Toward the Individual: The Anti-Pride of Thomas More's "Utopia" and "Anthem"'s Radical Alternative, by John Lewis

"Anthem" and Collectivist Regression into Primitivism, by Andrew Bernstein

This book provides fascinating glimpses into Ayn Rand's great classic. Don't miss it!

Robert Mayhew, a professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University, has edited three collections of essays about Ayn Rand's novels. Prof. Mayhew is associated with Leonard Peikoff's Ayn Rand Institute, which advocates Rand's philosophy (known as "Objectivism") in its most consistent, some would say dogmatic, form.

ANTHEM is my favorite work of Rand's fiction. Written after WE THE LIVING, ANTHEM is a "distopyian" novella describing life in a thoroughly egalitarian society in which people have lost even a sense of personal identity. It was first published in England in 1938. Rand produced a revised version in 1946.

This collection contains essays about the writing of ANTHEM, its background, its critical reception, its one adaption for radio, and philosophical issues raised by the book. As with Prof. Mayhew's collection on WE THE LIVING, the essays concerning the writing of the book and its reception are most interesting. In particular, Shoshana Milgram's essays are outstanding. She shows, for example, that it is likely that Orwell read ANTHEM and that it influenced 1984.

This book does display something of a cultic atmosphere. It is beyond annoying that certain authors constantly refer to Rand as "Ayn Rand." There is also the common Objectivist tendency to downplay the Nietzschean elements in Rand's early thought (which even pops up in later works). For example, Prof. Darryl Wright discusses Rand's notes for a never written novel entitled THE HIDDEN STREET. Although Prof. Wright discusses the protagonist Danny Renahan, he fails to tell his reader that this character was modeled after a child kidnapper and multiple murderer, William Hickman. ("The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have ever heard" Rand said of this creep.)

With a few reservations, I can recommend this book.