Ayn Rand’s 1,100-page magnum opus (1957). The premise: what happens if the people who hold the world up, the engineers, the industrialists, the builders, go on strike and vanish, Atlas shrugging at last. The mystery of “who is John Galt?” carries the plot until Galt himself answers it in a ~60-page speech laying out Rand’s whole philosophy: rational egoism, laissez-faire, reason as an absolute.
Even the table of contents is a manifesto: the three parts are named after Aristotle’s three laws of logic. Part 1, “No contradicción” (non-contradiction), then “Either-Or” (excluded middle), then “A is A” (identity). Chapter 1 is called “El tema”. The very first line is a bum asking Eddie Willers “Who is John Galt?”, a stock phrase everybody uses and nobody can trace, roughly “don’t ask questions nobody can answer”. Eddie is the loyal assistant of Dagny Taggart at Taggart Transcontinental; her brother James runs the railroad into the ground with one irrational decision after another, the prototype of the book’s “looters”.
One of the most polarizing books of the 20th century: a founding text of American libertarianism, famously ranked just behind the Bible in reader-influence surveys, and panned by literary critics from day one. Both things are true at once.