One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com's best-seller list. ("Winning," by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest. Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book.

For years, Rand's message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled "do-gooders," who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly perfect in its immorality."

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its influence except in private. When they first read the book, often as college students, they say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

"I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs that 'Atlas Shrugged' has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don't agree with all of Ayn Rand's ideas," said John A. Allison, 59, chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States. "It offers something other books don't: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete."

Mark Cuban, the Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have both said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

One of Rand's most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of "The Fountainhead," a novel about an architect who stays true to his principles. Greenspan had married a member of Rand's inner circle, known as The Collective, which met every Saturday night in her New York apartment.

Rand did not pay much attention to Greenspan until he began praising drafts of "Atlas," which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Rand's papers. He was attracted, Britting said, to "her moral defense of capitalism."

Rand's free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father's pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, "King of Kings."

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures until 1943, when readers of "The Fountainhead" began a word-of-mouth campaign that contributed to the book's fame. A manufacturer of fishing tackle in Kalamazoo, Mich., Monroe Shakespeare, paid for ads for the book.

Greenspan to the defense

"Atlas Shrugged" was released to terrible reviews in 1957. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of "greed is good." Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Shortly after it was published, Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic's comment that "the book was written out of hate." Greenspan wrote: " 'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."

Rand called "Atlas" a mystery, "not about the murder of man's body, but about the murder -- and rebirth -- of man's spirit." It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she "set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to a world without them."

John Galt lives on

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. They both were married to other people. In fact, Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protege relationship a sexual one.

"She wasn't a nice person, '' said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. "But what a gift she's given us."

Moore, a major benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Moore's honor. "As a woman and a Southerner," she said, "I thrived on Rand's message that only quality work counted, not who you are."

Rand's idea of "the virtue of selfishness," Moore said, "is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself."

"Even Mother Teresa," Moore said in an interview, "would agree with that: Take care of yourself first, and then take care of others."

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered "Atlas" at "a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist." He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

"Rand believed that there is right and wrong," he said, "that excellence should be your goal."

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand's ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Co., a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the company in the recession of 1982. Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Stack says, he took action like a hero out of "Atlas." He created an "open book" company in which all employees had to act like a Rand protagonist for their own economic survival.

Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in "Atlas": people guided by reason and self-interest.

"There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out," Stack said. "You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. 'Atlas' helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC."

The book's hero, John Galt, continues to live on. The subcontractor hired for the demolition of the former Deutsche Bank building, which was heavily damaged and contaminated when the neighboring World Trade Center towers fell in 2001, was John Galt Corp. And in Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

"We were reading the book," she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. "For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people.

''Some of our customers don't know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book," she went on. ''Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: 'Hey, where is John Galt? How come I'm not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?'"

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