Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was the pen name of Alice O'Connor, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. A Russian-American writer and philosopher, she became best known for her fiction and for the philosophical system she named Objectivism. Her life crossed several worlds: a Jewish bourgeois childhood in Russia, the upheaval of revolution and civil war, and then the American film, theater, and publishing scenes after she moved to the United States in 1926.

Rand’s early years gave her a sharp view of the conflict between the individual and the state. She was 12 when the October Revolution and Bolshevik rule disrupted her family’s life. Her father’s pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to Yevpatoria in Crimea during the Russian Civil War. After high school, she returned to Petrograd with her family, where they faced desperate conditions and at times nearly starved. At 16, she entered Petrograd State University, among the first women able to enroll after Russian universities opened to women. She studied history, was briefly purged with other bourgeois students, then reinstated, and graduated in 1924 from what had become Leningrad State University.

After a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad, Rand received a visa to visit relatives in Chicago and arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. She intended to stay in the United States and become a screenwriter. After several months learning English, she moved to Hollywood, where a chance meeting with Cecil B. DeMille brought work as an extra in The King of Kings and then a junior screenwriting job. On that film she met aspiring actor Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929. She became a permanent American resident that year and an American citizen in 1931.

Rand’s first literary sale was the screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932, though it was never produced. Her courtroom drama Night of January 16th was staged in Hollywood in 1934 and reopened successfully on Broadway in 1935, with audience members serving as a jury to decide which ending would be performed. Her first novel, We the Living, appeared in 1936. Set in Soviet Russia, it centers on the struggle between the individual and the state. Sales were slow at first, but a revised 1959 edition later sold more than three million copies. Her novella Anthem, published in England in 1938 and in revised American form in 1946, imagined a collectivist future where the word “I” had been forgotten.

Rand achieved fame with The Fountainhead in 1943 and published her best-selling novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. After that, until her death on March 6, 1982, she turned mainly to non-fiction, publishing periodicals and essay collections to promote Objectivism. She advocated reason, rejected faith and religion, supported rational and ethical egoism, and defended laissez-faire capitalism as a system based on individual rights, including private property rights. She condemned the initiation of force as immoral and promoted romantic realism in art. Her books have sold more than 37 million copies, while critics and academic philosophers have often challenged her style and method. Still, her words keep finding readers drawn to directness, self-command, and ambition: “The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me.”