A controversial novelist and philosopher — especially in academic circles — Ayn Rand attained widespread recognition, as indicated by a 1991 joint survey by The Library of Congress and The Book of the Month Club, which placed Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible as the most influential book among American readers. Signs of her influence began to blossom in the mid-1980s and accelerated throughout the 1990s. In 1985, the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, California, was established to increase the awareness of the existence and content of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Also in the mid-1980s, the Ayn Rand Society — an organization of professional philosophers devoted to studying and teaching her theories — was founded within the American Philosophical Association. A steady stream of books analyzing Objectivism has been published in recent years, and in 1995, The New York Times started reviewing those books. In 1997, a documentary film devoted to her life (Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life) was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service issued a first-class stamp commemorating her achievements.
Ayn Rand's ideas — and Atlas Shrugged, her greatest book and primary means of communicating those ideas — are an enduring part of American intellectual culture.
