mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.7

For the same reason, Ayn Rand chose the esthetic-moral concept “anthem” for her present title. In doing so, she was not surrendering to mysticism, but waging war against it. She was claiming for man and his ego the sacred respect that is actually due not to Heaven, but to life on earth. An “anthem to the ego” is blasphemy to the pious, because it implies that reverence pertains not to God, but to man and, above all, to that fundamental and inherently selfish thing within him that enables him to deal with reality and survive.

There have been plenty of egoists in human history, and there have been plenty of worshipers, too. The egoists were generally cynical “realists” (à la Hobbes), who despised morality; the worshipers, by their own statement, were out of this world. Their clash was an instance of the fact-value dichotomy, which has plagued Western philosophy for many centuries, making facts seem meaningless and values baseless. Ayn Rand’s concept of an “anthem to the ego” throws out this vicious dichotomy. Her Objectivist philosophy integrates facts with values—in this instance, the actual nature of man with an exalted and secular admiration for it.

The genre of Anthem is determined by its theme. As an anthem, or hymn of praise, the novel is not typical of Ayn Rand in form or in style (although it is typical in content). As Miss Rand has said, Anthem has a story, but not a plot, i.e., not a progression of events leading inexorably to an action-climax and a resolution. The closest thing to a climax in Anthem, the hero’s discovery of the word I, is not an existential action, but an internal event, a process of cognition—which is, besides, partly accidental (it is not fully necessitated by the earlier events of the story).8

Similarly, Anthem does not exemplify Ayn Rand’s usual artistic approach, which she called “Romantic Realism.” In contrast to her other novels, there is no realistic, contemporary background and relatively little attempt to re-create perceptual, conversational, or psychological detail; the story is set in a remote, primitive future and told in the simple, quasi-biblical terms that befit such a time and world. To Cecil B. De Mille, Ayn Rand described the book as a “dramatic fantasy.”9 To Rose Wilder Lane, in answer to a question, she classified it officially as a “poem.”10

She held the same view of the book in regard to its adaptation to other media. To Walt Disney, she wrote in 1946 that if a screen version were possible, “I would like to see it done in stylized drawings, rather than with living actors.”11

Then—in the mid-1960s, as I recall—she received a request from Rudolf Nureyev, who wanted to create a ballet based on Anthem. Ordinarily, Miss Rand turned down requests of this kind. But because of the special nature of Anthem (and because of her admiration for Nureyev’s dancing), she was enthusiastically in favor of his idea. (Unfortunately, neither a movie nor a ballet ever materialized.)

The point is that animation or ballet can capture a fantasy—but not Soviet Russia or the struggles of Roark or the strike of the men of the mind.

Anthem was initially conceived in the early 1920s (or perhaps a bit earlier) as a play. At the time, Ayn Rand was a teenager in Soviet Russia. Some forty years later, she discussed the work’s development with an interviewer.

It was to be a play about a collectivist society of the future in which they lost the word “I.” They were all calling each other “we” and it was worked out as much more of a story. There were many characters. It was to be four acts, I think. One of the things I remember about it is that the characters couldn’t stand the society. Once in a while, someone would scream and go insane in the middle of one of their collective meetings. The only touch of this left is the people who scream at night.12

The play was not specifically anti-Russian: I wasn’t taking my revenge on my background. Because if it were that I would have been writing stories laid in Russia or projecting them. It was my intention to wipe out that kind of world totally; I mean I wouldn’t want to include Russia or have anything to do with it. My feeling toward Russia at that