Ayn Rand

Lore & Background

Rand was born into a Jewish bourgeois family in Saint Petersburg. The October Revolution disrupted her family's life; her father's pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to Crimea. After graduating from high school, she returned to Petrograd, where they faced desperate conditions. She was among the first women to enroll at Petrograd State University after the Russian Revolution opened universities to women, studying history. She graduated in 1924, then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. She moved to the United States in 1926, settling in Hollywood, where she met director Cecil B. DeMille and worked as an extra and junior screenwriter. She married actor Frank O'Connor in 1929 and became a U.S. citizen in 1931.

Her first literary success was the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932, though it was never produced. Her courtroom drama Night of January 16th opened on Broadway in 1935. Her first novel, We the Living (1936), was semi-autobiographical and set in Soviet Russia; initial sales were slow. She wrote the novella Anthem in 1937, published in England in 1938. Her breakthrough came with The Fountainhead (1943), a novel about an uncompromising architect. It was rejected by twelve publishers before being accepted. She later published her best-selling work, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing periodicals and essay collections.

Reader's Guide

Ayn Rand's significance lies in her development of Objectivism, a philosophical system that advocates reason, rational and ethical egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism. She rejected faith, religion, altruism, and hedonism, and condemned the initiation of force as immoral. In politics, she supported individual rights and private property rights, though she opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism. Her fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics, with later work receiving more negative reviews. Academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, citing a polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Nonetheless, her writings have sold over 37 million copies and have influenced some right-libertarians and conservatives, despite her criticisms of them. The Objectivist movement continues to circulate her ideas both publicly and in academic settings.

Did You Know?

• Rand was prescribed Benzedrine (an amphetamine) to fight fatigue while completing The Fountainhead, and used the drug for approximately three decades.
• She testified as a 'friendly witness' before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, criticizing the film Song of Russia for misrepresenting life in the Soviet Union.
• Her novella Anthem presents a dystopian future where the word 'I' has been forgotten and replaced with 'we'.
• She was among the first women to enroll at Petrograd State University after the Russian Revolution opened universities to women.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life." — Ayn Rand "The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence." — Ayn Rand "A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible." — Ayn Rand "I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction." — Ayn Rand