Anthem Study Guide

Born in 1905 to Zinovy Rosenbaum and Alissa Rosenbaum, Ayn Rand was the oldest of three children and an able student. A formative event in her early life was the repossession of her father’s successful pharmacy business by the Bolshevik Communists, following the 1917 Russian Revolution. This, and other perceived misconduct by Russian Communists, likely fueled the resentment of collectivist ideologies that Rand expounds upon at length in Anthem. In 1924, Rand took up cinematic studies in the Soviet Union, and in 1926 was granted permission to relocate to Chicago in order to obtain more filmmaking knowledge. There, she married an actor named Frank O’Connor and changed her name from Alissa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand.

Rand’s repudiation of collectivism is undeniably a reaction to the collectivist ideologies of the Soviet Communists who dominated her homeland. In 1917, the government of Russia was taken over by Bolsheviks, whose ideology based itself on an elimination of class differences and the notion that social welfare should be derived “from each according to his ability,” and granted “to each according to his need.” The popularity of her work in the United States, in turn, likely stemmed from their compatibility with the more individualistic tenets of the country’s laissez-faire capitalist system.

The most directly related works to Anthem are Ayn Rand’s later novels, which more explicitly elaborate upon her philosophy of Objectivism. Of these, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are by far the most significant. In considering other related works, it may be useful to consult texts at the absolute opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Of these, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto is a definitive example; it is one of the most widely-known outlines of the sort of collectivist society that Rand denounces in Anthem.