Ayn Rand’s credit crunch comeback

How big is Rand's comeback?
She has always had a strong libertarian following in the US, but her magnum opus, the 1,088-page Atlas Shrugged, has enjoyed a big surge in sales since the start of the financial crisis. It sold 200,000 copies in the US in 2008; this year it's selling at its fastest rate since first published in 1957. Sales have spiked, says the Economist, whenever the US government has tried to prop up the economy: during the sub-prime crisis, last October's bank bailouts and the passing of Obama's economic stimulus package. In January the book reached 33 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, briefly surpassing Obama's The Audacity of Hope. It is now at number 20, four places above Thomas Paine's Common Sense and The Rights of Man.

What happens in Atlas Shrugged?
Rand's fourth novel describes a dystopian United States in which industrialists and the rest of America's "producers" – oppressed by government regulation – are persuaded by the novel's hero, charismatic inventor John Galt, to forsake the world of mediocrities, parasites and "second-handers" (ie those foolish enough to care about altruism and looking after the needy) and go on strike. The strikers, or "Atlases", retreat to a mountain hideaway, where they build an independent, unregulated economy. The strike stops the "motor of the world": machines break down, factories close, Fifth Avenue shops are boarded up, skyscrapers crumble, people riot, pirates roam the seas. The litter-strewn streets become hunting grounds for beggars and criminals. In the end, the socialists who have provoked this catastrophe beg Galt to take over the economy.

To whom does the book appeal?
People more scared of governments than bankers. Many right-wing pundits and bloggers in the US see shades of socialism in the response to the present crisis. Obama's economic strategy "is right out of Atlas Shrugged", writes Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal. "The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you." More fanatical market liberals even predict a Rand-style revolution, in which those tired of making sacrifices for fellow citizens decide to "Go Galt", by withdrawing labour or refusing to pay taxes. On Capitol Hill, Republican congress-man John Campbell has been handing out copies of the novel to his interns. "The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit the rest of us, are going on strike," he says.

And who was Ayn Rand?
Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg, her father was an entrepreneur whose business was seized by the Bolsheviks. In 1925 she fled to America, changed her name to Rand, and began working for Cecil B DeMille in Hollywood, before moving to New York to become a writer. She wrote two short novels before gaining popularity in 1943 with The Fountain-head, the story of a