The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature is a collection of essays regarding the nature of art by the philosopher Ayn Rand. It was first published in 1969, with a second, revised edition published in 1975. Most of the essays are reprinted from Rand's magazine The Objectivist. Summary At the base of her argument, Rand asserts that one cannot create art without infusing a given work with one's own value judgments and personal philosophy. Even if the artist attempts to withhold moral overtones, the work becomes tinged with a deterministic or naturalistic message. The next logical step of Rand's argument is that the audience of any particular work cannot help but come away with some sense of a philosophical message, colored by his or her own personal values, ingrained into their psyche by whatever degree of emotional impact the work holds for them. Rand goes on to divide artistic endeavors into "valid" and "invalid" forms. Photography, for example, is invalid to her (qua art form) because a camera merely records the world exactly as it is and has very limited, if any, capacity to carry a moral message beyond the photographer's choice of subject matter. Art, to her, should always strive to elevate and idealize the human spirit. She specifically attacks Naturalism and Modernism in art, while upholding Romanticism (in the artistic sense, which Rand distinguishes from the philosophy also called Romanticism, which she strongly opposed). The first eleven of the book's twelve chapters were essays originally written for periodicals and an introduction to an edition of Victor Hugo. The final chapter is a short story entitled "The Simplest Thing in the World". Publication history Most of the essays in the book originally appeared in The Objectivist, except for the "Introduction to Ninety-Three", which was an introduction for an English-language edition of the Victor Hugo novel. The first edition of The Romantic Manifesto was published by The World Publishing Company in 1969. It was Rand's first book to be published after her break with her former protégé Nathaniel Branden, and unlike her two previous essay collections it did not contain material by Branden or any other authors besides Rand. A paperback edition was published by New American Library in 1971. The revised edition in 1975 added the essay "Art and Cognition". Reception Upon its initial release, The Romantic Manifesto received only a few reviews. Most of these were brief and