Little Hawk, I hope this answers what you asked at 21 Jan 12 - 06:08 p.m. If not, lemme know.

Frankly, I think that most people here who are calling Ayn Rand a poor writer heard bad things about her before they tried reading any of her books, and thus, started with a prejudiced eye. By ANY literary standard, she at least started out as very good writer. Her style is more in the line of writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Victor Hugo, at least in her earlier novels such as We the Living and The Fountainhead. But then, if you don't like Tolstoy on literary grounds, you probably aren't going to like Ayn Rand either. It wasn't until Atlas Shrugged that she went off the rails and came out with a thousand-page political polemic with the plot-style of a comic book requiring huge speech balloons. She should have bypassed Atlas Shrugged and gone straight to non-fiction, which is what she later did.

The problem is not with her ability as a writer, it's with WHAT she writes.

As to her knowledge of philosophy, whether she misunderstood or misinterpreted it is open to argument—and that argument would be based more on whether one agreed or disagreed with her conclusions than with the extent of her knowledge of philosophy in general, or lack thereof. She certainly read widely in the field and was very knowledgeable in it—able to quote people like Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Berkeley, Locke, Russell, and others right off the top of her head. And she gave one of the clearest explanations of what might be called "the division of labor" (the three major fields—Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics) and the kind of questions each one asks in the formal study of philosophy that I have ever heard. And that includes in the number of philosophy courses I took as academic credits and electives at the University of Washington.

Although she trashed Fredrich Nietzsche's view of the Ûbermensch (Superman), because Nietzsche envisioned him as operating on instinct ("Blood and Bowels") rather than rationally and logically, she had a sort of Ûbermensch herself.

Nietzsche's idea of the ideal human was a lot like Conan the Barbarian on steroids.

Ayn Rand's "Ideal Man" was a supremely rational man and was, among other things, a creative genius with a faraway look in his eyes; a visionary, dressed in a business suit and carrying a slide rule. A creator. An inventor. A pioneer. Someone who could change the world for the better.

If only the leeches and the bureaucrats would leave him free to do it!

All of her heroes were extraordinarily talented, self-made men. And this is Ayn Rand's idea of what the America businessman truly is!

The Koch Brothers? Wall Street brokers? Bankers? Chairman of the Board of AIG?

The world in Ayn Rand's novels, and apparently in her mind, is a fictional world that works well only in her novels. There are, indeed, creative, visionary, talented people out there. But you rarely find them in charge of major companies.

By the same token, John Carter survived very nicely on the surface of Mars, without space suit or breathing apparatus.

But the REAL Mars isn't quite like that.

Don Firth