50-year-old novel still a big influence

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published nearly 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com's best-seller list. ("Winning," by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.) The 1957 novel was harshly reviewed and widely read. The book is "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly perfect in its immorality."

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

"I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs that 'Atlas Shrugged' has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don't agree with all of Ayn Rand's ideas," said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

"It offers something other books don't: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete," he said.

One of Rand's most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Rand's magazine, The Objectivist, would later publish several essays by Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of "The Fountainhead," a novel about an architect true to his principles.

Greenspan married a member of Rand's inner circle known as the Collective, which met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Greenspan until he began praising drafts of "Atlas," which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand's papers. He was attracted, Britting said, to "her moral defense of capitalism."

Rand's free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father's pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where director Cecil B. DeMille offered her a job as an extra in the silent movie, "King of Kings" and later a position as a junior screenwriter.

She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures until 1943, when fans of "The Fountainhead" began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.