Atlas Shrugged.

First edition, later printing of one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. Large octavo, original green cloth, frontispiece stamped in gilt, spine stamped in black and gilt, top stain black. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the Bicentennial of the United States on the half-title page, “To Ryan York and John Huszar - Cordially - Ayn Rand July 4, 1976.” The inscription is dated July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial of American independence, a date of singular resonance for Ayn Rand. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rand witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and the repression that followed, and in 1926 she emigrated to the United States, the country whose founding principles she would spend the rest of her life celebrating. Through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged she became one of the most influential American authors of the twentieth century and a passionate champion of individual liberty, reason, and free enterprise, giving fictional form to her philosophy of Objectivism. She regarded the United States as the first nation founded on the principle of individual rights, and saw the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the political expression of her own convictions. That she inscribed this copy of Atlas Shrugged on the two-hundredth anniversary of American independence, an immigrant who had fled a collectivist tyranny and found in America the freedom to think, write, and create, unites the nation’s founding ideals with the central themes of her life’s work. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by George Salter. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by The Harcourt Bindery. “From 1943 until its publication in 1957, [Rand] worked on the book that many say is her masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. This novel describes how a genius named John Galt grows weary of supporting a society of ungrateful parasites and one day simply shrugs and walks away. He becomes an inspiration to like-minded men and women, all of whom eventually follow his example, until society, in its agony, calls them back to responsibility and respect. Again [as with Rand’s novel The Fountainhead in 1943] reviews were unsympathetic, and again people bought the book” (ANB). The theme of Atlas Shrugged, as Rand described it, is "the role of man's mind in existence." The book explores a number of philosophical themes that Rand would subsequently develop into the philosophy of Objectivism. By 1984 more than five million copies of Atlas Shrugged had been sold, and in a 1991 Library of Congress survey Americans named it second only to the Bible as the book that had most influenced their lives. It is the basis for the trilogy of film adaptations subtitled Part I (2011), Part II (2012), and Part III (2014).…