This seemed a hell of a lot better than Atlas Shrugged to me. Maybe it’s because there are substantially more realistic characters, realistic conversations, decent plot development, a real setting. Maybe it is because I was severely pissed when I found that Halley’s Concerto did not really exist. And perhaps it was because the ending was by no means conventional happy crapola.
One has to wonder: why isn’t this Rand’s best known work? Please discuss.
At the end of Atlas Shrugged, the world went to hell in a handbasket. Not what I would call “happy crapola,” although admittedly the main characters did go off to their own little paradise. Is that what you’re referring to? Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? 
Haven’t read We the Living yet. I know, bad Ayn Rand fan. 
Should that have been in a spoiler box? If so, could a mod fix it?
Nah, that didn’t spoil AS. Some would say Ayn Rand spoiled AS. 
OK, I’m not one of 'em. I love the book, but you can kinda know how it ends up but it won’t spoil watching how it upfolds.
I’ve not yet read We The Living (another bad Ayn Rand fan)- I do want to get the video some time (filmed in fascist Italy because it was anti-Communist & then suppressed when the Gov’t realized it was totally anti-Statist).
Some people do see it as the most heartfelt & realistic & less abstract & philosophical of her novels. There is an idealized autobiographic air to it.
I have a one-sheet of that movie hanging in my classroom this very minute!
Realistic!? I used to call it “Passion and the Proletariat” … it needs a “heaving bosoms” cover, and maybe Fabio. And how many times can a character get a limb lopped off by the tram before it’s “unrealistic?” I guess what I am trying to say is… in my opinion it is a poorly written, overwrought, and yet somehow extremely boring book.
The best thing I can say about it…
Shortest. Ayn Rand novel. EVER.
I thought it was much better than Atlast Shrugged or The Fountainhead.
Perhaps it’s the over-the-top qualities of her longer novels that made them more memorable?
Nope. That’d be “Anthem.” (Which was also good, btw).
I dunno. “Anthem” is usually referred to as a novelette… 
I’d rank the novels this way: Fountainhead, Atlas, We the Living.
Atlas is ponderous, indeed, but there’s just so much good stuff going on with all the relationships. But The Fountainhead is clearly the best. Best characters, best action, and not so preachy.
The Fountainhead is my favorite but I also loved We the Living. Ayn said the We the Living was by far her most autobiographical novel.
Haj
I like Ayn Rand just as much as Officer Barbrady does!
If you can find it, try the very fine wartime Italian production, starring Alida Valli (“The Third Man”) and Rossano Brazzi, “Noi Vivi/Addio, Kira!”, two movies later consolidated in one 1986 version, We the Living. It’s amazing that anyone in Mussolini’s Italy would attempt to produce an anti-fascist story then – but since when was the Italian government a model of ruthless efficiency, anyway?
They only saw the anti-communist part. Communists were the dab guys in fascist Germany and Italy.
“bad” guys. There go my dyslexic fingers again…
Well, at the very end, Dagny and Galt are standing on a cliff looking over the darkened country (when the lights in New York go out, they knew that altruism had run its final course and collapsed) and preparing to return to it and set it right. Rearden and D’Anconia are discussing rebuilding industry and Judge Naragansett is drafting a new copy of the Constitution to essentially make socialism impossible (“Rule 6: No poofters”). Galt traces the sign of the dollar in the night air with his cigarette.
If a mod feels free to jam the quoted coment in a spoiler box, they may as well box mine, too.
I’ve never actually read We the Living, though I’ve kept an eye out in used bookstores for it.
Second-hander!