text: These reviews set the pattern for reaction to her ideas among liberal critics.Her subsequent books got progressively less review attention.Academic assessments of Rand's fiction Academic consideration of Rand as a literary figure during her life was limited.Mimi Reisel Gladstein could not find any scholarly articles about Rand's novels when she began researching her in 1973, and only three such articles appeared during the rest of the 1970s.Since her death, scholars of English and American literature have continued largely to ignore her work, although attention to her literary work has increased since the 1990s.Several academic book series about important authors cover Rand and her works, as do popular study guides like CliffsNotes and SparkNotes.In The Literary Encyclopedia entry for Rand written in 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation." In 2019, Lisa Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize for "her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle- to lowbrow aesthetic preferences ...and philosophical strivings".Philosophy Rand called her philosophy "Objectivism", describing its essence as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".She considered Objectivism a systematic philosophy and laid out positions on metaphysics, aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.Metaphysics and epistemology In metaphysics, Rand supported philosophical realism and opposed anything she regarded as mysticism or supernaturalism, including all forms of religion.Rand believed in free will as a form of agent causation and rejected determinism.