Anthem

Anthem is a short dystopian novel by Ayn Rand, written in 1937 and first published in 1938 in the United Kingdom by Cassell, after American publishers declined it. Rand had first conceived the story as a play when she was a teenager living in Soviet Russia. It was her second novel, after We the Living, and it did not appear in the United States until 1946, after the success of The Fountainhead, when she revised the text for the American edition. The book was written at a time when the Soviet Union still attracted considerable sympathy among Western intellectuals, and when the internal crimes of the regime were little known. Rand, who had lived under that system, wanted to warn of the dangers of collectivism, a purpose she later stated clearly in the preface to the 1946 edition.

The novel is set at an unspecified future date, after humanity has entered a new Dark Age. Society is governed by a World Council that assigns each person's profession, separates children from their parents and regulates nearly every aspect of life. The story takes the form of a diary written by candlelight in an underground tunnel by Equality 7-2521, a twenty-one-year-old man who recounts his childhood, his schooling and his growing sense that he is different. Because his language has no word for the individual self, he always refers to himself in the plural, a device that makes the text strange and reveals how deeply that way of thinking has shaped him. The technology he describes is primitive, with candles, animal-drawn carts and the official belief that the earth is flat, which underlines the regressive nature of this society.

The plot moves from his assignment as a street sweeper, which he accepts as penance for his wish to learn, to his discovery of a tunnel from a distant past, the Unmentionable Times, where he rediscovers electricity. When he presents his invention to the Council of Scholars, it is rejected and he is pursued, since his achievement threatens the established order. He flees into the forbidden forest, where he meets a woman he loves and with whom he begins a life beyond collective control. In an abandoned house in the mountains, reading the books they find there, they discover the word