The myth of Atlantis plays an important role in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As one character says, it represents the place where “only the spirits of heroes could enter, and they reached it without dying, because they carried the secret of life within them.” In a sense, there is such a place: America—in terms of its founding principles, its essence. The woman who helped Rand to see Atlantis as the symbol for this essence was her friend and mentor Isabel Paterson—pioneering journalist and philosopher, and author of The God of the Machine. In this talk, Timothy Sandefur explores the friendship between these two pathbreaking thinkers, who together offered future generations a pathway to Atlantis.