Sherry Chandler » Great American Novels???
Great American Novels???
An exchange between the headmaster of the Old School and Ayn Rand:
…If you had to name the single greatest work by an American author, what would it be?
Atlas Shrugged.
Your own novel
Is there another?
And after that?
The Fountainhead.
Is there really no other American author whose work you admire?
…There is one, she said, I am interested in the novels of Mr. Mickey Spillane. His metaphysic is perhaps rather instinctive but quite sound nevertheless…I would particularly recommend I, the Jury. In Mike Hammer, he has created a true hero, one who doesn’t torture himself in the current fashion with decadent niceties. Mike knows evil from good and destroys it without hesitation or regret. Most unusual. Most satisfying.
— Tobias Wolff, Old School (Vintage Books, 2003)
I must point out that this portrait of Ayn Rand is fictional and I have no idea what her actual opinion of Mickey Spillane might have been. This passage gives me cause to wonder, howver, whether our current president may have read, when he read at all, much of Mickey Spillane.
Nah. Probably caught the movie.
I might question the pronoun reference in the antepenultimate sentence in the quote.
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3 Comments
1. Charlie replies at 20th July 2006, 1:28 pm :
I think the reason Atlas was shrugging is because he just got kicked in the b–s by Ayn Rand. I don’t know about Mickey Spillane, but you can bet Bush and his cronies have read everything Ayn Rand has written. Y’know, she just might be the “mother of the neocons”.
2. Terry replies at 20th July 2006, 3:54 pm :
I was addicted to Ayn Rand for awhile — at about age 14. Luckily, I got over it.
3. sherry replies at 21st July 2006, 5:24 pm :
Me, too, Terry. I think it’s an impressionable age and girls are looking for a strong father type to fall in love with or some such psychobabble. Some time later, I tried to watch that movie with Gary Cooper — was that The Fountainhead? — and was just appalled.
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