The Lost Precursor to Atlas Shrugged

A story treatment Ayn Rand developed at age 18 became the source for plot elements in her magnum opus.

Sep 02, 2025

Many fans of Ayn Rand would be surprised to learn that key story ideas from Atlas Shrugged date all the way back to a narrative she developed as a teenager living in Russia, more than two decades before she began work on the novel itself.

Although no outlines or drafts of this early narrative survive, the story lives on in a fascinating 30-minute segment of Rand’s biographical interviews, now housed in the Ayn Rand Archives.

Between 1960 and 1961, Ayn Rand sat down with Barbara and Nathaniel Branden to talk about her life in preparation for a biographical essay written by Barbara Branden in Who Is Ayn Rand?

Rand recalled that during her late teens, she would write lists of story ideas, to be completed when she was “old enough . . . sometime between twenty and thirty. . . . I knew very well that I was somewhat too young to write them, and besides, they could not be written in Russia. But I was making outlines . . . of novels which I really intended to write, and the most notable of them was . . . the grandfather of Atlas Shrugged.”1

She described the story as “symbolic, much more than real . . . a sense-of-life projection of Atlas.”2 What follows is a condensed description of that early story’s narrative, as Rand remembered it decades later. By presenting it here, we aim to illuminate her literary imagination during those years in Russia, and the story ideas that were “advance echo[es]” and “concrete antecedents of Atlas.”3 Below we indicate some of them in passing. (If you’ve yet to read Atlas Shrugged, there are plot spoilers ahead.)

The Vanishing Geniuses of Europe

The story begins in Europe, in which many of the great men of ability on the continent — the scientists, industrialists, inventors, and other creative geniuses — are vanishing without a trace. For one of these men, all that his friends and family can figure out is that he was last seen at a nightclub with a mysterious female singer. When they investigate, it turns out that the singer has disappeared as well.4

The narrative seems to have been episodic in nature, focusing on a particular great man and his encounter with a strange woman, leading to his mysterious disappearance.5 The story is set to the backdrop of a European society that is becoming increasingly statist and collectivistic, mirroring political and philosophical trends at the time Rand was working on the story in 1923.6

The final episode of the story’s first act deals with “the last great statesman in Europe,” a pro-capitalist leader of Great Britain who has vowed never to vanish.7 This statesman chains himself to his desk, swearing “that he will not follow this girl if she approaches him.”8

After some time passes, the statesman leaves his office to attend a political meeting and heads down to the street where his chauffeur is waiting. At that moment, he is approached by a woman dressed in rags. She is the same mysterious woman who has been connected to all the previous disappearances.9 Rand describes her not only as physically beautiful but possessing spiritual beauty and intelligence.10 She tells him that on a specific date, a boat will leave England — and that he should be on it. Its destination: America. And he vanishes. This event marks the end of the story’s first act.11

A Hero on the Wrong Side

In the book’s next section, Rand recalls that the reader would be introduced to a new central figure: a young, idealistic labor leader who firmly believes in communism as an ideal and who is organizing a political entity called the “United Collectivist States of Europe.”12 Despite his stated premises, Rand describes him as “a man of ability on the wrong side of the fence.”13 She also explains that the character served as an early iteration of Andrei Taganov, one of the three central characters in Rand’s first novel, We the Living.14

Like the other great men introduced earlier in the story, the labor leader encounters the mysterious woman. She reveals to him the irresolvable conflict between his professed moral ideals and his subconscious individualistic premises. However, given the story’s fantastical nature, the labor leader identifies the contradictions in his soul by merely looking upon the woman’s face.15 In what was likely an early version of the way Rand describes John Galt’s face as “without pain, or fear, or guilt,” the woman’s appearance, conveying both physical and spiritual beauty, represents for these men a distant but unrealized ideal. She explains that lesser men “could be totally indifferent to her,” but that for great men, merely seeing her was completely transformative.16

The labor leader experiences this revelation the day before a major rally at which he is scheduled to speak. But when the crowd gathers the following evening, he does not appear. The next morning, his body is found atop what Rand refers to as the “Palace of Labor.”17 He has slashed his wrists and written in his own blood on the blank marble wall behind him: “Aristocrats of the world, unite!”18

The Man Who Would Not Be Bought

With his death, the last great hope of Europe is now a French inventor named Francois — the final remaining man of genius in Europe. Francois is a weapons manufacturer, commissioned by the collectivist European states to design new weapons in anticipation of a future war with America.

Though Francois is anti-collectivist, he loathes the woman who has become infamous for luring away Europe’s brightest minds. Although Rand does not explicitly say so, her description bears similarities to Dagny’s antagonism toward “the destroyer” in Atlas Shrugged. Francois believes that this woman is not a liberator, but someone who is attempting to “rule the world.”19

One night, while in his laboratory, Francois receives a message from the mysterious woman via a private, wireless device “that types out a radio-made telegram.” She tells him, “I need your services. I will buy you. I offer a million dollars.”20

The inventor, offended, refuses. “I will buy you. I offer two million dollars,” he counters.

She then replies: “I accept.”21

They agree to meet at his laboratory on a set date. He acquires the two million dollars in time for her arrival, despite the challenges of securing such a sum from the Collectivist States of Europe. At the appointed hour, she arrives. She is veiled. He sees her for the first time. She lifts the veil — she is naked beneath it — and they spend the night together. The next chapter opens with a newspaper headline: the inventor has disappeared.22

At some point in the story, Rand recalls, the reader would learn that the mysterious woman is, in fact, a wealthy American heiress who had faked her own death years earlier. Her fortune had been managed by an obscure figure — no one understood why he had been chosen as executor. The character’s name was Eddie Willers, a name that Rand explained she couldn’t help but re-use in Atlas Shrugged.23

This woman has been orchestrating the exodus of all the great minds of Europe, bringing them to America. That said, there isn’t anything like an organized strike, such as what we see with John Galt and the other strikers in Atlas Shrugged.24

The third act of the story may never have been fully developed. Rand explained that the final events dealt with a war between the Collectivist States of Europe and America. Armed with the minds of its greatest men, America wins decisively.25

Within this story we find not only “advance echo[es]” and “concrete antecedents of Atlas” but also Rand’s earliest conception of America, formed in the early 1920s through the American movies she watched in Soviet Russia — films she often saw multiple times, just to glimpse the New York skyline. It was through these films, she later said, that “what America represented was formed in those years. I saw what they could be and ought to be.”26 Thus, this early tale reveals both the seed of Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s youthful vision of the one country where such a novel could be written.

Ayn Rand, Biographical Interview #5 by Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, December 30, 1960, transcript p. 209 (Ayn Rand Archives).