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Considered to be Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged is an extensive work that extends her philosophy of Objectivism. Summary of the Book Atlas Shrugged portrays a dystopian future where society’s most creative and the brightest minds keep vanishing strangely, leaving the economy of the land vulnerable. Dagny Taggart, the protagonist, who runs a railroad business, is startled by the furtive absconding of the most intelligent minds. It is later discovered that the vanishing people are being led on a protest by a man called John Galt, to question the supremacy of the government. They are also led on to battle against the government’s dismissal of the rights and liberties of the individual. They wish to prove that if individuals are curbed by society and if they remain underprivileged of their rights to create, then civilization would be tracing backwards. There are also television and cinema adaptations of Atlas Shrugged. About Ayn Rand Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer, novelist, and philosopher who first came up with the philosophical system called Objectivism. She was born in Russia in 1905. She had started penning screenplays since she was eight years old, as she lacked any interest in going to school. She also started writing novels when she was only ten. When Rand was in high school, she became a self-proclaimed atheist and asserted that she believed in the significance of reasoning more than anything else. After high school, she came back to Saint Petersburg, her birth town, and joined the Petrograd State University. She studied Social Pedagogy and History there. Ayn also studied at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad for a year, after which she evolved her philosophy, Objectivism. She did so not only through her non-fiction writing, but also by giving lectures at several universities like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and MIT. She received an honorary doctorate from the Lewis & Clark College in 1963. Rand passed away due to heart failure in 1982 in New York City. Some of her other bestselling works are The Fountainhead, Night of January 16th, and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.