Rand, Ayn (1905–1982)

BORN ALISSA ROSENBAUM into a middle-class family in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1925 she immigrated to the United States, where she achieved success and fame. She is best known for objectivism, which rests on reason and fact and emphasizes individualism, limited government, and classical liberal protection of life, liberty, and property. She wrote both fiction and nonfiction works.

The communist Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war destroyed middleclass life in Russia and forced the family to the Crimea for a time, but Rand returned to Petrograd (the new Soviet name for St. Petersburg) to attend the University of Petrograd, where she studied history, philosophy, and literature. Her studies of American history and politics and the excesses of communism led her to admire American individualism, energy, and optimism as contrasts to collectivism, gloom, and decay. After graduation from Petrograd in 1924 and a year in the State Institute for Cinema Arts studying screenwriting, she left for America in 1925, ostensibly to visit relatives. In the United States, she would be free to write what she chose. She studied English in Chicago, Illinois, then moved to Hollywood, California, where she met movie director Cecil B. DeMille, who gave her a job as extra on King of Kings, and writer Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929. Rand and O'Connor remained married until his death in 1979.

Working for DeMille helped Rand finance her writing. She also worked nonwriting jobs. Finally, in 1932, she sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios. That year her first stage play also debuted, Night of January 16th. She was also working on We the Living (1936), which was rejected for several years because its theme was the brutality of Soviet life, and the 1930s was a time when many American intellectuals, including her reviewers, were either communists or admirers of the Soviet experiment.

While We the Living was being rejected, in 1935, Rand began work on The Fountainhead(1943), which focused on individualist ethics—independence and integrity. Howard Roark, the hero, embodies heroic and principled living. Again the publishers were reluctant, with 12 rejecting the manuscript, and reviewers and intellectuals were negative. The novel became a bestseller despite reviewer opinion. It made Rand famous and financially independent. In 1949, Rand wrote the screenplay for a Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal movie for Warner Brothers.

Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, began taking form in 1946, while Rand was working part-time as a screenwriter. In 1951, she moved to New York and worked on the novel full-time. The novel appeared in 1957. It is a well-developed expression of her political [Page 832]and ethical philosophy, objectivism, which defines “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,” expresssed one commentator. The book was a bestseller, and Rand wrote no more fiction although, she regarded herself as a novelist rather than a philosopher.

The two novels attracted a following more for their philosophy than for their artistic qualities. Psychologist Nathaniel Branden and economist Alan Greenspan and other early followers convinced Rand to turn to nonfiction as a way of developing her philosophy systematically. She wrote and lectured between 1962 and 1976 on what became known as objectivism. Her articles appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter (1962 to 1965), The Objectivist (1966 to 1971), and The Ayn Rand Letter(1971 to 1976). The essays were the basis for nine nonfiction books that developed the philosophy and applied it to social issues. Book titles include: The Virtue of Selfishness; Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; and The Romantic Manifesto.

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