Matthew Lieff Christian & Sophia Lauwers in Anthem | Photo: Carol Rosegg  

What one makes of the literary merits, such as they are, of Ayn Rand depends on what company she keeps. For her most perfervid admirers, she is both a great novelist and a great philosopher, and the relevant points of comparison are Aristotle and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in whose company Rand must be considered a figure of no significance. Rand was known to compare herself with pop-pulp figures, notably Mickey Spillane, alongside whom she looks pretty good. In my mind, Rand should be judged against other novelists with similarly unsubtle sociopolitical agendas, such as John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens. In that company, Rand has a mixed record: She never wrote anything remotely as fine as Our Mutual Friend or Of Mice and Men, but neither did she write anything as insufferable as The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that makes Atlas Shrugged look positively contemplative in comparison. But about this much her admirers and her detractors should agree: Rand deserves better adaptations than those her works have endured. The two installments in the cinematic trilogy of Atlas Shrugged have been terrible and terrible, and even the more highly regarded 1943 film of The Fountainhead manages to out-melodrama the novel, which is not an easy task.