Atlas at 50

I spent the day at a 50th birthday party for a novel: Atlas Shrugged. Attendance was higher than expected - around 300. Some members of the press dropped in. CSPAN videotaped a lot of it and plans to air it on Oct 13.

The program was lively. I suppose the biggest buzz concerned the Hollywood people who are working on the movie. I enjoyed Anne Heller's tantalizing preview of her forthcoming biography of Rand. She has a lot of new material, and has clearly enjoyed her work.

I also want to mention Mimi Gladstein's talk about the role of film technique in Rand's prose style, which fleshed out something I had was more vaguely aware of. The material, and more, will appear in this new collections of essays on Atlas. In conversation afterward, she mentioned that lasting literature usually "works on multiple levels" (as we English majors like to say).

She writes of steel and trains,
And disappearing brains
In cinematic prose
That fairly glows.