This narrow perspective doesn't sit well with me. I read Shrugged while growing up poor, and I think a thoughtful take would be that she wrote, in her own way, something which could be in the running as the "Great American Novel" alongside Gatsby or Huckleberry Finn. It captures a zeitgeist, even if I don't personally want this world at large, and I think we lose an important part of literature discussions to allow a discourse as simple as "Rand bad".
If one’s view is that Atlas Shrugged constitutes a novel at all — rather than an objectivist manifesto rattled off by “characters” with all the inherent humanity of damp toilet tissue — one’s perspective is so ludicrously narrow that all I can prescribe is anything whatsoever by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and call me once the fever breaks.
But, yes, Rand’s turds do appeal to those poor enough financially that they didn’t receive a rich and broad education and poor enough intellectually that they couldn’t give themselves one.
