Ayn Rand Institute’s Annual Essay Contests: Cash Prizes of Rs. 84 Lakhs: Submit by May 1, 15

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Program Overview

Have you read one of Ayn Rand’s thought-provoking novels? Now’s the time! Enter an Ayn Rand Institute essay contest for your chance to win thousands of dollars in cash prizes.

ARI has held worldwide essay contests for students on Ayn Rand’s fiction for thirty years. This year we will award over 750 prizes totaling more than $130,000.

ANTHEM Essay Contest

Eligibility for Anthem

8th, 9th and 10th Grade

Topics

1. Anthem depicts a world of the future, a collectivist dictatorship in which even the word “I” has vanished. Discuss the hero’s struggle to free himself from collectivism. What makes his victory possible? In your essay, consider what Ayn Rand has to say in the excerpt titled “The Soul of an Individualist” from her novel The Fountainhead.
2. In Anthem, the City has numerous rules and controls. Why do these exist? What is their purpose? Do you think the society that Equality envisions creating at the end of the story would include any of these rules and controls? Explain why or why not.
3. Contrast Equality’s view of morality at the end of the novel to the morality exemplified by his society’s institutions, practices, and officials. In your essay, consider what Ayn Rand has to say in these excerpts from her writings.

Entry Deadline

May 1st ,2018

THE FOUNTAINHEAD Essay Contest

Eligibility for The Fountainhead

11th and 12th Grade

Topics

1. How do Keating’s and Roark’s paths to success differ? Which one in the end is the real success? In your essay, consider what Ayn Rand has to say in these excerpts
   from her writings.
2. Choose the scene in The Fountainhead that is most meaningful to you. Analyze that scene in terms of the wider themes in the book.
3. The theme of The Fountainhead, said Ayn Rand, is “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” How do the motives and actions of Roark, Keating and Toohey dramatize this theme? In your essay, consider what Ayn Rand has to say in these excerpts from her writings.

Entry Deadline

May 15, 2018

ATLAS SHRUGGED Essay Contest

Eligibility for Atlas Shrugged

12th Graders, College Undergraduates, and Graduate Students

Topics

1. An important early event in the novel is the destruction of the Phoenix-Durango. What factors make its destruction possible? How does this issue relate
   to the meaning and theme of Atlas Shrugged? In your answer, consider what Rand has to say in her 1962 essay “The Pull Peddlers.”
2. Capitalism’s defenders usually appeal to the “public good” as the moral justification of capitalism. Contrast this approach to defending capitalism with Ayn Rand’s
   approach in Atlas Shrugged. In your answer, consider what Rand has to say in her 1965 essay “What Is Capitalism?”
3. Francisco d’Anconia and his teacher, Hugh Akston, advise more than once: “Check your premises,” because contradictions do not exist. Identify at least two major
   apparent contradictions that the heroes of Atlas Shrugged encounter, and explain, with reference to the novel, what premises they need to check and correct in order
   for them to understand that these “contradictions” do not exist.

Entry Deadline

May 15, 2018

View contest flyer here. 

For more details, visit the original website here.

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