Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She began writing novels at the age of 10 and was interested in politics from an early age. In high school, she decided that she was an atheist and that she placed her faith in reason. By this time, the Bolsheviks were in power in Russia and confiscated her father’s pharmaceutical business, leaving the family with next to nothing. In college, she took on the name “Ayn Rand” as her professional name for writing. Rand came to America in 1926 to visit relatives, and later said that she “cried tears of splendor” on seeing the Manhattan skyline. She decided to stay on in the United States to be a screenwriter and moved to Hollywood, where she met her husband, Frank O’Connor. Though she tried to bring her family from Russia to the United States, they were not granted visas. Rand continued writing screenplays, plays, and fiction, but her first major success was The Fountainhead, which was published in 1943 and which she’d worked on for seven years. It brought her fame and financial security, and was also made into a movie in 1949, for which Rand wrote the screenplay. In 1951, she moved to New York and several of her admiring readers met regularly at her house to discuss ideas and politics, a group that was jokingly called “the Collective.” In 1957, Rand published Atlas Shrugged, which became a bestseller despite many negative reviews, and was Rand’s last work of fiction. She expanded the ideas she had explored in her fiction into a philosophy she called “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 continued to explain and expand on Objectivist principles through lectures at universities and publications in Objectivist periodicals. In 1982, she died of heart failure at her home in New York City.