For me, it was OPAR by Peikoff. I was 17 at the time, and I didn’t know anything about Ayn Rand but I had seen her mentioned once in a while on the internet. My father is a libertarian who buys a ton of books, and I was browsing through the bookshelves in his bedroom when I came across OPAR. It looked interesting, so I read it.
What about you?
Wow! That’s quite a way to be introduced.
For me, it was Atlas Shrugged. I was supposed to read it for a college scholarship, but missed the deadline and picked it up a year later. About 1/3 into it I started skipping around in her nonfiction, too.
The Fountainhead
Philosophy: Who Needs It? Was the first book I read but I was introduced by a friend who was personal trained by Mike Mentzer. He got another friend to read AS and Fountainhead and that person claimed it was the best book he ever read (AS). I read all of her non-fiction before even opening her fiction.
Anthem. My daughter was assigned to read it in high school so I read it too. After that I read Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead, and We the Living and everything else I could get my hands on including OPAR.
A coworker loaned me a copy of ITOE. After that, it was most of the non-fiction before I got to the opus-magnum. One of the talk radio stations had a host that analyzed the news and news-makers through the lens of his grasp of Ayn Rand’s works. This was during the late 80’s early 90’s.
“Virtue of Selfishness” .. a friend (not sympathetic to Objectivism then or later) gave it to me saying he’d just read this really odd/different book and he thought I might like it. I looked at the title and thought it was a silly gimmick… I mean, how can one say that selfishness is a virtue… but, I read it out of curiosity.
I remember reading Anthem when I was seventeen. (I’m twenty-one now.) I remember finding the message of finding freedom, even alone in the midst of a totalitarian state, very inspiring.
Then I read Atlas Shrugged a year ago, and became an Objectivist after reading it.
Neat to see these different personal stories. My first read was The Fountainhead, followed immediately by Atlas Shrugged, which had the fully developed philosophy. That was in 1967, when I was 18–19 years old.
Related Interest: How Many Times Have You Read Atlas Shrugged?
I saw this video, which I found hilarious, and just imagined a book by Rand would be pretty cool for individualism - at the time I was very liberal-leaning, probably like an Andrei type. Then I heard a story on NPR about the “rape” scene in the Fountainhead, and it sounded fascinating a writer would create such a scene. I asked for Atlas Shrugged for my 18th birthday soon after, took a while to finish it, I tend to read slowly!
I had read The Fountainhead for fun in my mid-teens, but I wasn’t introduced to Objectivism as a philosophy until college. My then-girlfriend was investigating libertarian ideology (she was a political science major) and I decided that, as a liberal, I would take on the strongest arguments to demonstrate how they were faulty.
I picked The Virtue of Selfishness and it kicked my ass.
Atlas.