When I was a college student, I was not a serious intellectual, but I did have some interest in ideas. I took courses in religion and philosophy and discussed these subjects with my peers. Ultimately, I concluded that religion had no rational basis. I also concluded that philosophy, at least academic philosophy, was simply a game played with words that were divorced from reality and had no relevance to anyone's actual life. Politically and economically I was a pragmatist; I was for what worked. I was puzzled, however, by the hostility that intellectuals showed toward capitalism, when it seemed to work very well. Ethically, I believed that you should be honest (though I could not say why); otherwise, I assumed that ethics was concerned with issues such as why you should be nice to your grandmother and why you should give money to the poor. All of these views changed radically when, in my junior year, I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I was so enthralled by the book, I read it almost nonstop during a twoto three-day period. Emotionally I was in shock for some time afterward. The book changed my whole outlook on life and philosophy. Ayn Rand was a novelist of the romantic school (Rand, 1975). She wanted to portray and project, not man as he (i.e., your next door neighbor), but man as he could be and ought to be (i.e., the ideal man). (Ayn Rand did not use gender-neutral language in her writings. As the only major female philosopher in history, as a novelist who had female as well as male heroes [e.g., Dagny Taggart], and as an advocate of careers for women long before it was fashionable, she can hardly be accused of viewing women as second-class citizens. Out of respect for her, I will use the terms he and man to refer to he or she and man or woman throughout this essay.) To do this she first had to develop a concept of what the ideal man was. This required that she develop an explicit philosophy. In her novels the heroes are the embodiments or concrete expressions of her philosophy in action, and her villains are the embodiments of its opposite. As a romanticist Ayn Rand presents her characters in stylized form, that is, in terms of their essential characteristics (e.g., she does not present them grocery shopping or engaging in small talk). Morally, her heroes and villains are presented in terms of black and white, not shades of grey. These sharp contrasts, in addition to her luminously clear style, her original and exciting plots, and her brilliant philosophical and psychological insights, give her novels enormous emotional impact. One of the most startingly original features of Atlas Shrugged is that the heroes are businessmen. From Charles Dickens to Upton Sinclair to the moderns, businessmen had almost universally been portrayed as evil. (For contemporary examples in the realm of art, see the movie Wall Street or almost any TV drama or soap.) Ayn Rand showed that businessmen, by using their