Rand-O-Rama: Ayn Rand's long shelf life in American culture.

"This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall....Nothing she has to say is said in a second-rate fashion. You have to think of The Magic Mountain ... when you think of The Fountainhead."--Lorine Pruette, The New York Times Book Review (1943)

"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To the gas chambers--go!'.... A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie [sic] Nation."--Whittaker Chambers, Notional Review(1957)

"Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of fife and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. [The New York Times reviewer] suspiciously wonders 'about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work.' This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing."--Alan Greenspan, future chairman of the Federal Reserve, responding to a negative review of Atlas Shrugged, in The New York Times (1957)

"It's all great, Heft Except...do you really think our readers will dig a nude fold-out of Ayn Rand?"--"Hefner and His Pals," a comic strip in Mad magazine (1967)

"Like most of my contemporaries, I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18 years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect ... and his love life.... I deliberately skipped over all the passages about egoism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that The Fountainhead did a great deal more for architects than Architectural Forum ever dreamed."--Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review (1968)

"He spent several days deciding on the artifacts [that would be found with his dead body].... He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by his scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card."--Philip K. Dick, A Sconner Darkly (1977)

"With acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand"--liner notes to the Rush album 2112 (1976)

JENNIFER GREY: You can't just...