This course is a philosophical analysis of the greatest novelists of the Romantic school. It will focus on three authors and books: Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Taking a detailed familiarity with the plot of all three for granted, the course will analyze their intellectual content in a deepening progression: from plot-theme to theme to underlying premises in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. The purpose is to compare and contrast the fundamental philosophical principles of the three greatest masters of the novel form.