On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> My pal Corey Robin writes...
>
> <http://www.thenation.com/article/garbage-and-gravitas>
>
> Garbage and Gravitas
> Corey Robin
>
> St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn
> Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was
> neither but thought she was both. Many other people have thought so too. In
> 1998 readers responding to a Modern Library poll identified Atlas Shrugged
> and The Fountainhead as the two greatest novels of the twentieth
> century—surpassing Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and Invisible Man. In 1991 a
> survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club found that
> with the exception of the Bible, no book has influenced more American
> readers than Atlas Shrugged.
>
> One of those readers might well have been Farrah Fawcett. Not long before
> she died, the actress called Rand a "literary genius" whose refusal to make
> her art "like everyone else's" inspired Fawcett's experiments in painting
> and sculpture. The admiration, it seems, was mutual. Rand watched Charlie's
> Angels each week and, according to Fawcett, "saw something" in the show
> "that the critics didn't."
>
> ...
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