I've read most of Rand's fiction, most of her essays and a number of her letters and found everything I read stimulating, even when I didn't agree with it, which was often (I'm a progressive Democrat with strong socialist tendencies).
One of the things I enjoyed most about her work was her astute use of personality types as character models. I knew who Ellsworth Toohey was the moment he entered the story, and seeing him there helped me to better understand people I had known in life. The same was true with many other characters in her work. Granted, both Howard Roark and John Galt are a bit two-dimensional for my taste and often serve as mouthpieces for her ideology, but much like Milton's “Paradise Lost,†I think Rand's stories have more interesting devils than they do heroes.
I also think there's a great deal to be said for achievement and individuality, even though Rand says it much the way Zarathustra does and so is off-putting (“If you cannot help them to rise, help them to fall faster!â€). Still, I appreciated her challenge to the reader to work hard, enjoy the fruits of that work and not allow oneself to be dragged down into mediocrity or groupthink.
I am not comfortable with the “Randroids†I've met or read about (what a great turn of phrase!), since I think they've taken her work as a license to pillage and damn the consequences (and perhaps she did indeed mean it to be taken that way). But I confess that I do have my Reardonesque days, and on those days, I am more wholly an individual, and that can't be a bad thing.
Anyway, there's my two bits, or my apology for Ayn Rand, or whatever. =)
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