ayn rand atlas shrugged the fountainhead

The strikers have created their own secret enclave known as 'Galt's Gulch', a town secluded in a Colorado mountain valley, based on Ouray, Colorado.

She calls him 'The Destroyer' and regards him as her arch-enemy, on one occasion seeing a door which just closed and realizing he had been in the room ahead of her. This strike is not revealed immediately within the story, but forms the backdrop of the novel as a mystery which protagonist Dagny Taggart seeks to uncover, with Galt as her antagonist.

While working incognito as a laborer for Taggart Transcontinental railroad, he travels to visit the key figures that he has not yet recruited, systematically persuading them to join the strike. When the company owner dies and his heirs decide to run the factory by the collectivist maxim, ' From each according to his ability, to each according to his need', Galt refuses to work there any longer and abandons his motor.ĭuring the main storyline of the book, Galt has secretly organized a strike by the world's creative leaders, including inventors, artists and businessmen, in an effort to 'stop the motor of the world' and bring about the collapse of the bureaucratic society. Galt takes a double major in physics and philosophy, and after graduating, he becomes an engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, where he designs a revolutionary new motor powered by ambient static electricity.

There he meets Francisco d'Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld, who become his two closest friends. The novel unfolds Galt's story in a progressive retrospective, with Galt, the son of an Ohio garage mechanic, leaving home at age twelve and beginning college at the fictional Patrick Henry University at age sixteen. He serves as a highly individualistic counterpoint to the collectivist social and economic structure depicted in the novel, in which society is based on oppressive bureaucratic functionaries and a culture that embraces mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism, which the novel posits is the result of collectivist philosophy. Also, in the later part it becomes clear that Galt had been present in the book's plot all along, playing several important roles though not identified by name.Īs the plot unfolds, Galt is acknowledged to be a philosopher and inventor he believes in the power and glory of the human mind, and the rights of individuals to use their minds solely for themselves. Although he is not identified by name until the last third of the novel, he is the object of its often-repeated question 'Who is John Galt?' and of the quest to discover the answer. John Galt ( / ɡ ɔː l t/) is a character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Ayn rand atlas shrugged the fountainhead