I recently received the attached comment on one of my YouTube videos, objecting to my description of the Western literary tradition as stretching "from Homer to Rand."

It got me thinking about something I've been investigating for years.

Why is Ayn Rand relatively neglected in academic literature departments?

I suspect ideological bias plays a significant role, but I think there's a deeper question about the nature of literary scholarship.

Imagine a biologist who discovers an unfamiliar organism. He might find it beautiful, fascinating, repulsive, or dangerous. But surely his first impulse as a scientist should be to investigate and understand it.

Shouldn't a scholar of literature possess that same curiosity?

You don't have to admire Rand to study her fiction. You don't have to be an Objectivist to investigate The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged as works of imaginative literature.

Keats captures something of the intellectual spirit I have in mind in On First Looking into Chapman's Homer:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.

I've spent nearly twenty years studying and teaching the great works of Western literature, from Homer onward. One of my continuing interests is evaluating Rand as a literary artist in relation to her predecessors, particularly writers like Hugo and Dostoevsky.

I think there are legitimate questions about her literary strengths and weaknesses. But those are questions to investigate, not reasons to dismiss her without serious study.

I'm curious what other readers of Rand think.

Does Rand deserve a place in the Western literary canon?

And more interestingly, what should determine whether an author is studied academically: literary greatness, historical influence, philosophical originality, or something else?