Rand's Novels 2 - Anthem

Anthem is a dystopian novella written in 1937. It is unique in Rand's ouvre in a number of ways. It is largely plotless (as Rand herself admitted) and it's much shorter than her other published fiction. It's more a parable than a story, and while it lacks the portentousness of her last novels, honestly, it's little more than a trifle. It's a short piece of fiction which has its basis, initially, in Rand's experiences during the early years of Soviet Russia. In Anthem, Rand took some of the high moral rhetoric that was used to defend communism in Russia and took these scraps of incoherent sentimentality to its logical extreme.