I was surprised to read Chris Benson’s assertion that Ayn Rand’s âÄúAtlas ShruggedâÄù ignores “impolite and dirty” aspects of the lives of business people and portrays them as “inherently good”. Anyone who’s read that novel knows that it’s full of both good and evil business people and wishy-washy in-between business people. At the beginning we meet the protagonist Dagny Taggart and her brother Jim, both railroad executives. She’s good and he’s evil. He gets public credit for running the company while she does the actual hard work, being excluded by a glass ceiling from the higher rank that her brother occupies. Ayn Rand was made famous by her only novel that doesn’t have very heavy doses of politics: âÄúThe Fountainhead,âÄù a story about artistic integrity as exemplified by the architect Howard Roark. Some politics is clearly there, but it’s not central. I recommend that book if you want to judge her as a writer without having your preferred flavor of political biases distract you. Michael Hardy Mathematics lecturer