Your welcome John. We need everyone to read it.

I didn't skip it but it took me a while. I think this outline will help me the next time thru.

Super! Thank You, Rich!!! -- j


p.s. I have, again, copied it to Word,
and can share at will.

For me the Speech was among my favorite parts. A real page turner - so exciting to lay it out for the masses.

Years later, a friend who'd read AS several times confessed he always skipped the Speech. I was dumbfounded. First I knew that others weren't as enamored as I.

That's a good point Herb. Reading her non-fiction definitely helps.

Your welcome Fountain. David Kelley said she expected it to take 3 months but it took 2 years.

Thanks for this post. I read (I think it was in Ayn Rand's Biography) that she wrote that speech over a period of ten years.

Got to re-read the Galt speech as I look over the outline. It looks pretty good.
As to the difficulty of reading the speech, I found that I wasn't able to absorb it in one reading. I thought I had the gist of it, but I finished the novel and went back to the speech enough times to wrinkle the pages. After reading her subsequent non-fiction, I found it easier to understand the full meanings and implications of the speech.

An AS fan told me that Rand was in talks back in the sixties to bring Atlas Shrugged to the big screen. The project was shelved when she refused to allow them to edit Galts speech.

The Speech is the most difficult part of the whole thing. If I were assigning AS as required reading, I would advise my students to treat the speech as a separate assignment.

This might have been what Nathaniel Branden meant by "a novel is not to be read as a philosophical treatise."

It lays out her philosophy as nothing else could. But does it take too much dramatic license? I say it does. I suggest to you that John Galt would have delivered a few pithy remarks that would have taken all of fifteen minutes. He would have made the same pitch he made to Kenneth Dannager--and did he really take three hours to convince him? Recall that Midas Mulligan famously boasted he took all of fifteen minutes to join John Galt in his strike.

Whom was he trying to reach?

1. Dagny Taggart, and

2. Anyone out there who might form their own rebel community. Which, according to AS, many did.

After that speech, the country saw a mass exodus. Yet a few holdouts still hung on at Rearden Steel, until finally one of them set the plant on fire--two months later.

The point is: if you can't convince anyone in maybe an hour, you're not going to convince them in three. At least, I don't think you are. Any ideas?

I agree that the outline is helpful, but as to wanting to read the speech over and over again...

Not so much.

That is why I found this helpful. I know I missed key points the rand was trying to make. I want to rad it again and again...

I found the actual speech in AS way too hard to read, personally. You can't treat a philosophical treatise like a speech - especially to the untrained masses.

If it were me giving the speech, I would simply have laid out the case that said that I was no longer willing to be stolen from by an overbearing government. It's fine to explain the rationale, but seriously, the best speeches are under five minutes. That one would have take 30+ minutes to orate.

Remember - the mind can only absorb what the hind end can endure...

She covered a lot and it was interesting as part of the story, not just a philosophical text. The book was written such that I was excited to hear it.

Thanks Pirate. It's amazing what she was able to do with one speech.

That's a great find Rich. I'll read it tonight.