40 Fun Facts About Anthem (Ayn Rand)

Which Unspeakable Word, punished by death in Ayn Rand's Anthem, does the hero finally find in old books?

The lost word is "I", and when the hero finally reads and understands it he weeps for the first time in his life. Until then he has only ever spoken of himself in the plural.

Which lost discovery does Equality 7-2521 make again through his secret experiments in Ayn Rand's Anthem?

Electricity is the strange new power he tames, using it to light a glass box salvaged from the ruins of an earlier age. He expects the gift to earn him a place among the Scholars.

Which lowly job is Equality 7-2521 given for life in Ayn Rand's Anthem, though he longs to be a Scholar?

Street Sweeper is the Life Mandate handed to him at fifteen, and he welcomes it as penance for having wanted something better. The work later leads him to the hiding place where he studies.

Which name from the old books does Equality 7-2521 choose for himself near the end of Ayn Rand's Anthem?

Prometheus took the light of the gods and brought it to men, which is what the hero hopes to do for a darkened world. He also notes that such bearers of light always suffer for it.

Which rock band's 20-minute suite 2112 tells a story with strong parallels to Ayn Rand's Anthem?

Rush drummer Neil Peart said the parallels dawned on him only as the story came together, so he credited Ayn Rand in the liner notes. The band also recorded a song titled Anthem.

What secret name does Equality 7-2521 give Liberty 5-3000 in Ayn Rand's Anthem, where such names are forbidden?

The Golden One is what he calls the girl with dark eyes and fair hair he sees working beside the road. Thinking of one woman above all others is itself a crime in the City.

Where does Equality 7-2521 flee in Ayn Rand's Anthem after the Scholars reject his invention?

The Uncharted Forest is forbidden ground outside the City, and he is sure nobody will pursue him there. Such woods are said to have grown over the ruined cities of an earlier age.

How does the City in Ayn Rand's Anthem execute the man who dared to speak the Unspeakable Word?

Burned at the stake as the City watched, the man seemed to the ten-year-old Equality 7-2521 to have the face of a saint. The boy felt the dying man had picked him out of the crowd.

What is the newest invention in the backward future of Ayn Rand's Anthem, where sundials still tell the time?

The candle is the society's proudest advance, and winning approval for it from every Council took fifty years. That delay is one reason the Scholars refuse to consider anything newer.

In what form does Equality 7-2521 tell his story in Ayn Rand's Anthem, an act his society counts as a sin?

A private journal carries the whole novella, written at night on stolen paper. Writing words meant for no eyes but his own is among the first crimes the narrator admits to.

Where does Equality 7-2521 hide each night to study and experiment in Ayn Rand's Anthem?

An abandoned tunnel with metal tracks, left over from an earlier age, becomes his laboratory. He slips away to it during the hours everyone else must spend at the theatre.

In which country was the teenage Ayn Rand living when she first imagined the story that became Anthem?

Soviet Russia filled her school days with attacks on individualism, which set her wondering what would happen if people lost the very idea of the self. She left for America in 1926.

Which philosophical system did Ayn Rand, the author of Anthem, later develop and name herself?

Objectivism treats a person's own happiness as the moral purpose of life, the conviction Anthem's hero reaches on his own. Ayn Rand set the system out in full only in her later books.

What shape do people in Ayn Rand's Anthem believe the Earth is, a sign of their lost science?

It is flat, they are taught, with the sun circling around it. Their doctors are no better off, still treating the sick by bleeding them.

Which everyday state is a grave sin in Ayn Rand's Anthem, yet is how the narrator begins his tale?

Being alone is both a crime and a sin in the City, where nobody may act or think apart from the group. The hero's stolen hours of solitude are where his independence begins.

Which Ayn Rand work was she researching when she took a summer break to write Anthem?

The Fountainhead went on to become a best seller, and only after that success did Anthem appear in the United States. Until then American publishers had not wanted it.

In which country was Ayn Rand's Anthem first published, after American publishers turned it down?

England saw the first edition, issued by the publisher Cassell, eight years before a revised American version appeared. Cassell had already handled an earlier Ayn Rand novel.

Where do Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 find the old house they make their home in Ayn Rand's Anthem?

In the mountains they come upon a house left from the old world and decide to stay. They are astonished to find it was built for only two people.

Which name does Liberty 5-3000 take at the end of Ayn Rand's Anthem, when she is expecting the hero's child?

Gaea was the mother of the earth and of all the gods in the old legends the hero has been reading. He asks her to take the name as the mother of the free people he hopes will follow.

What name does Liberty 5-3000 give Equality 7-2521 in Ayn Rand's Anthem after he tells her his name for her?

The Unconquered is what she has been calling him in her own mind all along. Each has singled the other out, which their laws forbid.

Which doctrine, blamed by Ayn Rand for both fascism and communism, is the target of her novella Anthem?

Collectivism, the idea that the individual must be sacrificed to the group, was in her view the root of the political disasters of the 1930s. Anthem imagines a world where it has won completely.

What blunt working title did Ayn Rand drop from Anthem because it gave away too much of the theme?

Ego struck her as too blunt and unemotional, so she picked a title that lets readers discover for themselves what is praised. The book remained, in her mind, an ode to the self.

What pastime marked out International 4-8818, the hero's only friend in Ayn Rand's Anthem?

Drawing on walls with pieces of coal, he made pictures that set people laughing, and there is still laughter in his eyes. He is the first person the hero plans to go back and rescue.

Which body in Ayn Rand's Anthem decides each fifteen-year-old's work for the rest of their life?

The Council of Vocations hands out every Life Mandate, and nobody may question its choice. By pushing the best young minds into manual labor, the rulers head off dissent.

Which yearly event in Ayn Rand's Anthem sees the state assign men and women to each other?

The Time of Mating sends every man older than twenty and every woman older than eighteen to a single arranged night. Children born from it are raised by the state and never know their parents.

How does Equality 7-2521 get out of the Palace of Corrective Detention in Ayn Rand's Anthem?

He simply walks out, because the locks are old and nobody is on watch. No prisoner in the City has ever thought of trying to escape before.

In Ayn Rand's Anthem, what is the sin of wanting one career or having one best friend called?

Transgression of Preference covers any favoring of one person or task over another, since all are supposed to be equal. The hero commits it in both ways.

What does Equality 7-2521 see for the first time when he bends over a stream in Ayn Rand's Anthem?

His own reflection looks back at him from the water, and he is delighted that his body seems as worthy as his mind. He has lived twenty-one years without seeing it.

To which class of workers does Liberty 5-3000 belong in Ayn Rand's Anthem when the hero first sees her?

Peasants like her live outside the City and work the fields, where he notices her from a road at its edge. She is seventeen when they meet.

How does Equality 7-2521 leave the hall in Ayn Rand's Anthem when the Scholars move to destroy his invention?

Through a window he goes, smashing the glass with his fist and leaping out with the box held in his arms. He runs without knowing where until the City is behind him.

Which author's earlier dystopia We, where people also go by numbers, is often compared with Ayn Rand's Anthem?

Yevgeny Zamyatin had also lived under Communist rule, though there is little evidence Ayn Rand ever read his book. His citizens still have airplanes and X-rays, while hers have lost such things.

Rejecting Anthem, the American publisher Macmillan reportedly said Ayn Rand did not understand which idea?

Socialism was the subject Macmillan thought she had wrong, a verdict her heir later made public. She had spent her youth under a government that claimed to be building it.

For a retrospective version of which science fiction award was Ayn Rand's Anthem nominated in 2014?

Hugo voters shortlisted it for Best Novella seventy-six years after it first appeared. A libertarian science fiction society had already placed it in its Hall of Fame in 1987.

Which Hollywood figure did Ayn Rand write to in 1946 about a possible screen version of Anthem?

Walt Disney received a letter saying she would prefer the story told in stylized pictures instead of by living actors. Talks about film, opera and ballet versions all came to nothing.

What do the rulers in Ayn Rand's Anthem call the upheaval that ended the old free world and began their own?

The Great Rebirth wiped out political freedom and installed the one Great Truth, that no person exists apart from the whole. Speaking of the age before it is against the law.

Where are the worn-out citizens of Ayn Rand's Anthem sent to live once they reach the age of forty?

Home of the Useless is where everyone goes at forty, judged too worn by toil to serve any further. Few people in this world live much beyond that age.

A futuristic story in which American magazine persuaded Ayn Rand that Anthem could find mainstream readers?

The Saturday Evening Post ran a short story set in the future, which showed her that mainstream magazines would print such fiction. Until then she had not planned to write the tale at all.

Which 1971 Robert Silverberg novel is set in a society sharing the central taboo of Ayn Rand's Anthem?

A Time of Changes also follows a rebel against a ban on one small word. Silverberg has said that the two books are otherwise very different.

Which Franz Kafka story was reprinted beside Ayn Rand's Anthem in the last issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries?

The Metamorphosis shared the pulp magazine's final issue with the novella in June 1953. The first American hardcover edition of Anthem came out that same year.

Whom did Ayn Rand name as heir to her estate, the man who later explained how Anthem got its title?

Leonard Peikoff inherited the rights to nearly all her writing, though Anthem itself has passed into the public domain in the United States. He had been one of her close associates.