Atlas Shrugged
1957 · 1200 pages
The people who keep the world running go on strike. Dagny Taggart holds her railroad together as the competent vanish, and Rand's case that selfishness is a virtue still powers American libertarianism.
★ 5.5
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Fountainhead
1943 · 736 pages
Howard Roark would rather break rock in a quarry than compromise a design, and when his housing project is altered he dynamites it. American individualism has had no more seductive hero.
★ 5.7
Butcher's Crossing
1960 · 274 pages
Full of Emerson, a Harvard student goes west and finances a buffalo hunt into a hidden Colorado valley. The killing lasts weeks, the winter shuts them in, and nature stops being a consolation.
★ 5.8
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
1882 · 850 pages
Trust thyself, Emerson writes, and every heart vibrates to that iron string. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes called his Harvard address the declaration of independence of American intellectual life.
★ 6.8
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
1860 · 402 pages
Burckhardt invented cultural history by looking past popes and battles at how Renaissance Italians lived, finding the moment people began to think of themselves as individuals. We still see the period his way.
★ 7.3