Atlas shrugged when is it set

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. We really could have just put "the world" for the setting, or at the very least America. This is a sweeping book with a worldwide scope. We have characters traveling all over the continental United States, and we hear about events everywhere from Argentina to England.

It's no mistake that one of our main characters runs a transcontinental railroad. This is a book about a whole country of people and problems. There are a few main locations, though, that each embody certain sets of ideals and values. Our umbrella setting isn't so much a place as it is a state of affairs: urban decay. The very first scene we get in the novel is a description of a creepy and gloomy New York City: The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece.

Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender soot-eaten walls. New York in this world is only a shadow of its former self, a "fading masterpiece.

And we see the same scenes repeated all across the country, from Philadelphia to Starnesville, Wisconsin. The movie is apparently set in but the less is said about the movie, the better.

There is a slightly veiled reference to the Soviet Union and to Nazi Germany in the book where a character states that in one major country the state is everything and in another the race is everything, but both are against the individual. It implies that both communism and fascism are known systems of ordering society in the book.

Adam Keller Adam Keller Clearly the book, like many fiction books, is a commentary on real-world society. But it's not literally set in the real world, so this doesn't really answer the question of whether the fictional setting is in the present or the future. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Upcoming Events. October—November topic challenge: Jorge Amado ends Nov November—December topic challenge: the Decameron ends Dec Featured on Meta.

Now live: A fully responsive profile. Submit your literature reviews to our Tumblr! How do I tag questions properly? Related 9. Romanticism saw man as a being able to choose his values, to achieve his goals, to control his own existence. The Romantic writers did not record the events that had happened, but projected the events that should happen; they did not record the choices men had made, but projected the choices men ought to make.

Get a free answer to a quick problem. Most questions answered within 4 hours. Twentieth-century culture spawned the most oppressive dictatorships in human history.

The Fascists in Italy, the National Socialists Nazis in Germany, and the Communists — first in Russia and later in China and elsewhere — seriously threatened individual freedom throughout the world. Ayn Rand lived through the heart of this terrifying historical period. In fact, when she started writing Atlas Shrugged in , the West had just achieved victory over the Nazis. For years, the specter of national socialism had haunted the world, exterminating millions of innocent people, enslaving millions more, and threatening the freedom of the entire globe.

The triumph of the free countries of the West over Naziism was achieved at an enormous cost in human life. However, it left the threat of communism unabated. Ayn Rand was born in Russia in and witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist conquest of Russia, and the political oppression that followed. Even after her escape from the Soviet Union and her safe arrival in the United States, she kept in close touch with family members who remained there.

But when the murderous policies of Joseph Stalin swallowed the Soviet Union, she lost track of her family. From her own life experiences, Ayn Rand knew the brutal oppression of Communist tyranny. During the last days of World War II and in the years immediately following, communism conquered large portions of the world.

Soviet armies first rolled through the countries of Eastern Europe, setting up Russian "satellite" nations in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere. Shortly thereafter, communism was also dominant in Cuba, on America's doorstep. In the s and s, communism was an expanding military power, threatening to engulf the free world. This time period was the height of the Cold War — the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union ruled its empire in Eastern Europe by means of terror, brutally suppressing an uprising by Hungarian freedom fighters in The Russians developed the atomic bomb and amassed huge armies in Eastern Europe, threatening the free nations of the West.

Like the Nazis in the s, communists stood for a collectivist political system: one in which an individual is morally obliged to sacrifice himself for the state. Intellectual freedom and individual rights, cherished in the United States and other Western countries, were in grave danger. Foreign military power was not the only way in which communism threatened U. Collectivism was an increasingly popular political philosophy among American intellectuals and politicians. In the s, both national socialism and communism had supporters among American thinkers, businessmen, politicians, and labor leaders.

The full horror of Naziism was revealed during World War II, and support for national socialism dwindled in the United States as a result. Many American professors, writers, journalists, and politicians continued to advocate Marxist principles. When Ayn Rand was writing Atlas Shrugged, many Americans strongly believed that the government should have the power to coercively redistribute income and to regulate private industry.

The capitalist system of political and economic freedom was consistently attacked by socialists and welfare statists. The belief that an individual has a right to live his own life was replaced, to a significant extent, by the collectivist idea that individuals must work and live in service to other people.

Individual rights and political freedom were threatened in American politics, education, and culture. Rand argues in Atlas Shrugged that the freedom of American society is responsible for its greatest achievements.