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Anthem |
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| Book: Paperback: Mass Market | 4.05 x 6.88in | 272 pages | ISBN 9780451191137 | 01 Mar 1996 | Signet | 18 - AND UP |
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Written with all the power and conviction that made The Fountainhead a classic of American
letters, Ayn Rand's Anthem is a hymn to man's independent spirit and to the highest word in the
human language - "Ego."
First written in 1937, Anthem was published in England, but was refused in publication in
America, for reason which the reader might discover by reading it for himself. In 1946, it appeared
as a pamphlet, issued by Pamphleteers, Inc., of Los Angeles. This is its first American publication in
regular book form.
Anthem tells the story of a man who rediscovers the individualism and his own "I" - in a world of
absolute collectivization, a world where sightless, joyless, selfless men exist for the sake of serving
the State; where their work, their food and their mating are prescribed to them by order of the
Collective's rulers in the name of society's welfare - a world which has lost all the achievements of
science and civilization, when it lost their root, the independent mind, and has reverted to primitive
savagery - a world where language contains no singular pronouns, where the "We" has replaced
the "I," and where men are put to death for the crime of discovering and speaking the
"unspeakable word."
The story tells of one man who rebelled, of his struggle and his victory. Assigned to the life work of
street sweeper by the rulers who resented his brilliant, questioning, unsubmissive mind - he
becomes a scientist, secretly, risking his life for the sake of his quest for knowledge. In the midst of
collective stagnation, where men toil at manual labor by the light of candles - he discovers
electricity. In the midst of eugenic planning and State-controlled Palaces of Mating - he discovers a
personal love and a woman of his own choice. In the midst of brutal morality which proclaims that
man is only a sacrificial animal to the needs of others - he discovers that man's greatest moral duty
is the pursuit of his own happiness. He endures danger, denunciation, imprisonment, torture - but
he breaks the chains of the Collective, he escapes with the woman he loves, to start a new life in
an uncharted wilderness, and he reaches the day when he is able to predict that "my home will
become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake."
Anthem presents not merely a frightening projection of existing trends, but, more importantly, a
positive answer to those trends and a weapon against them, a key to the world's moral crisis and
to a new morality of individualism - a morality which, if accepted today, will save us from a future
such as the one presented in this story.
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