[backwoods-engineer]

Somebody please tell me that "Atlas Shrugged" is better than "The Fountainhead." I got 1/3 of the way through the latter some years ago, and literally threw the book across the room, screaming, "there are no people like that!" I never read the rest, but gave the book back. The characters are completely un-human, one-dimensional, devoid of any emotion (least of which compassion), and acted like they did not care whether they lived or died, or whether anybody else did. I cannot relate to them at all.

So, if the protagonists of "Atlas Shrugged" are anything like that, I will neither read the book nor see the movie.

Talk me down from my tree here.

[Onelifetogive]

Somebody please tell me that "Atlas Shrugged" is better than "The Fountainhead."

I like both books, but they are not dramatically different. The characters are VERY one dimensional, and no, they are not really like real people. They represent a pure ideal. IMnsHO.

[Gondring]

I got 1/3 of the way through the latter some years ago, and literally threw the book across the room, screaming, "there are no people like that!"

From The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldn't Win:

[...] Toward the end of her life, Rand listened as a prominent psychologist stood onstage and dismissed her fictional heroes—those idealized steel barons and physicists and composers—as implausible. Soon she’d had enough and stood up in the crowd, outraged.

“Am I unreal?” she shouted. “Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?”

She intended this, one suspects, as a refutation. It strikes me as maybe the most profound question she ever raised.

[higgmeister]

Talk me down from my tree here.

Tis far better for you to simply stay there!