by Ayn Rand

Introduction by Leonard Peikoff

An audiobook excerpt from Chapter One
The incomparable novel about the men of the mind on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice.

Ayn Rand's epochal novel, first published in 1957, has been a continual bestseller as well as an intellectual landmark. It is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world-and did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators? Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies but against those who needed him most-and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the world's motor-and the motive power of every man?

Tremendous in its scope, this novel presents an astounding panorama of human life-from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction to the philosopher who becomes a pirate to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad to the lowest track worker in her Terminal tunnels.

Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's masterpiece. It is a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller.

(Hardcover; 1,192 pages)