Ayn Rand's novels are regularly reread by her admirers as a source of spiritual fuel. But what gives her fiction its tremendous emotional power? In answer, this course examines passages from her fiction illustrating crucial philosophical and psychological issues, such as the mind-body integration, egoism, independence, the spiritual value of other people, masculinity and femininity, the root of evasion, and the life-or-death importance of ideas. By showing how Ayn Rand concretizes these abstractions, the class teaches you how to distill the principles that point to the source of her novels' emotional power—and thus how to extract even greater enjoyment from her works.