"prolific" is a strange benchmark but Conrad is a good answer. Wasn't Kerouac a native French speaker? I don't know which of them wrote more total.
Yeah I always forget about him. And how was Rand not literary?
At the risk of sounding extremely douchey if you read 5 pages of Rand and 5 pages of any author who took their prose seriously it's fairly night and day. Conrad at his worst wrote circles around Rand, and at his best he is truly one of the finest novelists in English.
>"prolific" is a strange benchmark
Prolific can mean either the amount of words written or amount of works sold. Rand likely holds the #1 spot for books sold. >if you read 5 pages of Rand and 5 pages of any author who took their prose seriously it's fairly night and day.
Heart of Darkness and Atlas Shrugged have rather comparable lexile scores tbh, but yes I agree the prose of the 1890s was certainly superior to prose of the 1940s and 1950s.
I think his author ratings are funny but he missed the mark several times throughout. IIRC he said Conrad was juvenile compared to Wells which is...an interesting take. I read a webpage with all of that on it once a year or so whenever it comes up and I wonder how seriously he even took it, and how much of it was just intellectual gadflyism for the lulz
Have you read The War of the Worlds? After the 5 or 6 chapters it becomes more of an existential horror book than it does science fiction.
True re: Rand selling more. Although if you count anthologies and the like it wouldn't surprise me if Conrad beats her out because HoD and the preface are constantly reprinted in Norton anthologies and the like. Of his novels, I've always been partial to Lord Jim. No idea what the lexical score of that or any of his other works are like. When I teach it students tend to hate it at first but the sort of creeping, somber mediocrity is so perfectly fin-de-siècle. At the end of the day I suppose I just admire Conrad's prose and Wells' ideas and utopian visions.
I've read all of Wells' major works. I enjoyed the time machine and tono bungay immensely. Rand I could do without. I think she had great difficulty separating her fiction and her political screeds and even in short novels like anthem you can tell (I think) that she was putting politics before poetics. I don't really know where I was going with this...
I think his author ratings are funny but he missed the mark several times throughout. IIRC he said Conrad was juvenile compared to Wells which is...an interesting take. I read a webpage with all of that on it once a year or so whenever it comes up and I wonder how seriously he even took it, and how much of it was just intellectual gadflyism for the lulz
Considering both quality and quantity, I think Kipling is a clear winner. It's just a question of how "ESL" you consider him. Up to the age of five he lived in an Anglo-Indian household and his primary language (the one he "thought and dreamed" in, he said) was Hindustani.
Kipling is the boy for quantity plus quality. But if you want quantity plus a bit less quality, I'm sure plenty of people beat AR.
How about Rafael Sabatini? (The guy who wrote "Captain Blood", "Scaramouche", etc?) He grew up in Europe and learned about five languages, none of them English. Then he moved to England and decided to write in English because "all the best stories are in English".
He wrote loads of books. Not sure how many but at least a couple of dozen. They weren't as long as Ayn Rand’s but I bet his word count was higher. Plus his books are actually enjoyable and have PIRATES who LAUGH IN THE FACE OF DANGER and TAME THE PROUD BEAUTY.
[...]
Kipling is the boy for quantity plus quality. But if you want quantity plus a bit less quality, I'm sure plenty of people beat AR.
How about Rafael Sabatini? (The guy who wrote "Captain Blood", "Scaramouche", etc?) He grew up in Europe and learned about five languages, none of them English. Then he moved to England and decided to write in English because "all the best stories are in English".
He wrote loads of books. Not sure how many but at least a couple of dozen. They weren't as long as Ayn Rand’s but I bet his word count was higher. Plus his books are actually enjoyable and have PIRATES who LAUGH IN THE FACE OF DANGER and TAME THE PROUD BEAUTY.
I remember the intellectual caliber of people who didn’t “get it” when we read Anthem back in high school. Ever since then I’ve seen her as a pleb filter.
Also IQfy hates her because she said Kant was the devil.
What percentage of people didn't get Anthem of all things? She basically takes 100 pages and rants over and over about her political beliefs. I can't imagine missing the point with that one but I also know that there are a lot of really stupid people out there.
I hate her because she's a rotten writer but that's besides the point.
The usual reaction I hear from people is that she's a bad writer because her political views are inseperable from her fiction. I didn't find this to be the case for Fountainhead. You can read it politically, but I thought there was more to it than that. It seemed more like reflections on what it means to be a creative person.
All the people Roark confronts are all people I've known IRL who get into a field for all the wrong reasons - either money, or lifestyle, or cultural relevance - and have virtually no interest or knowledge in the actual deeper artistry of what they're doing and then wonder why they're unhappy and never create anything of substance.
Also the fricking shit you have to eat to actually make it in a creative field is well described. I don't know, I've always felt very drawn to Fountainhead. I feel like reading politics onto that is a very shallow reading. I guess I'm alone in that though because I've never met anyone who looks at it from that POV.
Everyone I try to talk to about it is either rabidly antagonistic toward it because of her politics, or wrapped up in cult-like adoration for the same reasons.
Never read Anthem though, so I don't know. Objectivism as a philosophy seems pretty shallow. I just don't get the kneejerk reaction she gets compared to the mountains of garbage that's also out there.
Anthem is very short and if you read it I think you'll get a better sense of why people dislike her. It's all of her worst impulses wrapped into one novella. I think if Rand was remembered as a weird, minor author like Richard Hughes people wouldn't mind her at much, but some of her fans building their entire lives around Atlas Shrugged is extremely offputting. I think what you're saying about Fountainhead is compelling but having to interrogate a book to get beyond the constant barrages of objectivist politics that are so clearly front and center isn't something many people are interested in. It's a 'shallow reading' of the book but also the reading Rand made it painfully clear she wanted to get across.
4 weeks ago
Anonymous
FWIW I did try reading Atlas Shrugged and got bored and put it down. I felt like it was a much longer, hamfisted, militaristically political version of Fountainhead, so there's that.
It's a shame. I really do feel like Fountainhead changed my life, but not because I suddenly started voting libertarian. It was more just an affirmation of my suspicions about the life of an artist. It was nice to see the whole thing wrapped up so perfectly, in my opinion anyway. I can't talk to anyone about it though because people exclusively drive straight to her politics.
But I guess part of the blame for that falls on Rand herself. She really shot herself in the foot by doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on attempts at her hard edge political "philsophy" rather than exploring those same themes with nuance, which I believe she was capable of doing.
>Early life >Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a israeli bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg in what was then the Russian Empire.
In the same way that syphilis proliferates in the brothel, yes!
Penetrative force and a fistful of cash? Sounds about right.
I think Joseph Conrad wrote more (and was actually literary).
AND he was an ETL
Yeah I always forget about him. And how was Rand not literary?
"prolific" is a strange benchmark but Conrad is a good answer. Wasn't Kerouac a native French speaker? I don't know which of them wrote more total.
At the risk of sounding extremely douchey if you read 5 pages of Rand and 5 pages of any author who took their prose seriously it's fairly night and day. Conrad at his worst wrote circles around Rand, and at his best he is truly one of the finest novelists in English.
>"prolific" is a strange benchmark
Prolific can mean either the amount of words written or amount of works sold. Rand likely holds the #1 spot for books sold.
>if you read 5 pages of Rand and 5 pages of any author who took their prose seriously it's fairly night and day.
Heart of Darkness and Atlas Shrugged have rather comparable lexile scores tbh, but yes I agree the prose of the 1890s was certainly superior to prose of the 1940s and 1950s.
Have you read The War of the Worlds? After the 5 or 6 chapters it becomes more of an existential horror book than it does science fiction.
True re: Rand selling more. Although if you count anthologies and the like it wouldn't surprise me if Conrad beats her out because HoD and the preface are constantly reprinted in Norton anthologies and the like. Of his novels, I've always been partial to Lord Jim. No idea what the lexical score of that or any of his other works are like. When I teach it students tend to hate it at first but the sort of creeping, somber mediocrity is so perfectly fin-de-siècle. At the end of the day I suppose I just admire Conrad's prose and Wells' ideas and utopian visions.
I've read all of Wells' major works. I enjoyed the time machine and tono bungay immensely. Rand I could do without. I think she had great difficulty separating her fiction and her political screeds and even in short novels like anthem you can tell (I think) that she was putting politics before poetics. I don't really know where I was going with this...
>Prolific can mean either the amount of words written or amount of works sold.
I've never seen it used to mean amount of works sold but whatever.
Kerouac grew up in a French speaking family yes, in Massachusetts.
Nabokov was right about Conrad.
The only thing Nabokov was right about was that time he said Joyce made him seem like an amateur.
I think his author ratings are funny but he missed the mark several times throughout. IIRC he said Conrad was juvenile compared to Wells which is...an interesting take. I read a webpage with all of that on it once a year or so whenever it comes up and I wonder how seriously he even took it, and how much of it was just intellectual gadflyism for the lulz
Considering both quality and quantity, I think Kipling is a clear winner. It's just a question of how "ESL" you consider him. Up to the age of five he lived in an Anglo-Indian household and his primary language (the one he "thought and dreamed" in, he said) was Hindustani.
Kipling is the boy for quantity plus quality. But if you want quantity plus a bit less quality, I'm sure plenty of people beat AR.
How about Rafael Sabatini? (The guy who wrote "Captain Blood", "Scaramouche", etc?) He grew up in Europe and learned about five languages, none of them English. Then he moved to England and decided to write in English because "all the best stories are in English".
He wrote loads of books. Not sure how many but at least a couple of dozen. They weren't as long as Ayn Rand’s but I bet his word count was higher. Plus his books are actually enjoyable and have PIRATES who LAUGH IN THE FACE OF DANGER and TAME THE PROUD BEAUTY.
Well done RS.
Kipling was not ESL.
>she
that's a man
Nope, it's Nabakov without a doubt
was he really ESL? He sure sounded like one but I think he was taught English as a boy
Oh shit I was wrong, he did learn to read and write in English before Russian... despite being Russian in Russia.
Filthy communist c**t.
relax boomer, it's just a novel.
She is famous for being virulently anti-communist. You must confuse her for someone else.
She was vociferously anti-Communist, anon.
Of all the things to accuse Ms. Rand
lmao what?
She makes fritters of English so maybe Google is onto something
I remember the intellectual caliber of people who didn’t “get it” when we read Anthem back in high school. Ever since then I’ve seen her as a pleb filter.
Also IQfy hates her because she said Kant was the devil.
Rand is the devil.
What percentage of people didn't get Anthem of all things? She basically takes 100 pages and rants over and over about her political beliefs. I can't imagine missing the point with that one but I also know that there are a lot of really stupid people out there.
I hate her because she's a rotten writer but that's besides the point.
The usual reaction I hear from people is that she's a bad writer because her political views are inseperable from her fiction. I didn't find this to be the case for Fountainhead. You can read it politically, but I thought there was more to it than that. It seemed more like reflections on what it means to be a creative person.
All the people Roark confronts are all people I've known IRL who get into a field for all the wrong reasons - either money, or lifestyle, or cultural relevance - and have virtually no interest or knowledge in the actual deeper artistry of what they're doing and then wonder why they're unhappy and never create anything of substance.
Also the fricking shit you have to eat to actually make it in a creative field is well described. I don't know, I've always felt very drawn to Fountainhead. I feel like reading politics onto that is a very shallow reading. I guess I'm alone in that though because I've never met anyone who looks at it from that POV.
Everyone I try to talk to about it is either rabidly antagonistic toward it because of her politics, or wrapped up in cult-like adoration for the same reasons.
Never read Anthem though, so I don't know. Objectivism as a philosophy seems pretty shallow. I just don't get the kneejerk reaction she gets compared to the mountains of garbage that's also out there.
Anthem is very short and if you read it I think you'll get a better sense of why people dislike her. It's all of her worst impulses wrapped into one novella. I think if Rand was remembered as a weird, minor author like Richard Hughes people wouldn't mind her at much, but some of her fans building their entire lives around Atlas Shrugged is extremely offputting. I think what you're saying about Fountainhead is compelling but having to interrogate a book to get beyond the constant barrages of objectivist politics that are so clearly front and center isn't something many people are interested in. It's a 'shallow reading' of the book but also the reading Rand made it painfully clear she wanted to get across.
FWIW I did try reading Atlas Shrugged and got bored and put it down. I felt like it was a much longer, hamfisted, militaristically political version of Fountainhead, so there's that.
It's a shame. I really do feel like Fountainhead changed my life, but not because I suddenly started voting libertarian. It was more just an affirmation of my suspicions about the life of an artist. It was nice to see the whole thing wrapped up so perfectly, in my opinion anyway. I can't talk to anyone about it though because people exclusively drive straight to her politics.
But I guess part of the blame for that falls on Rand herself. She really shot herself in the foot by doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on attempts at her hard edge political "philsophy" rather than exploring those same themes with nuance, which I believe she was capable of doing.
>Early life
>Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a israeli bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg in what was then the Russian Empire.