WHICH IS UNFAIR TO SPILLANE:

Had she not become a guru, Ayn Rand would have been the kind of person few people really like who still accumulates admiring followers, whom she would banish for the slightest deviation from total devotion. She would have been a particularly mean Mean Girl, terrorizing some suburban high school and then a middle class suburb. Judging from the stories told even by her admirers, she seems not to have had friends, only inner circles. [...]

 

Still, it's easy to laugh at Rand and her work. Flannery O'Connor wrote of her fiction, in which Rand incarnated her philosophy in a stick-figure kind of way: "I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

 

Then there is the famous comment ascribed to the writer Raj Patel: "There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

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