What is most notable about Rand’s fiction is how thoroughly it undermines Americans’ traditional understanding of the heroic figure, as it was first formulated in our myth of frontier settlement and depicted in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41). As a frontier scout and solitary bachelor who lives in the wilderness, Cooper’s hero, Natty Bumppo, is a romanticized embodiment of pure self-reliance. Yet in times of crisis, he always arrives to save the day for the Anglo-American settlers whose company he neither wants nor needs.
But according to the credo of the radical libertarians who seek to emulate characters out of Atlas Shrugged, the American hero has no obligation to the community. In times of crisis, heroic virtue no longer requires self-sacrificial acts rooted in the social affections of loyalty or gratitude; it has been reduced instead to pure self-interest. When the alarm sounds, the first shot is fired, or a pandemic erupts, these self-crowned sovereigns are inclined to flee the field, shedding citizenship like the uniform of a losing army, retreating to their hideaways in the Rockies, silos in South Dakota, or subterranean havens on the Kiwi islands.