Dec 23, 2009

Atlas Shrugged | Author Biography

Ayn Rand, a.k.a. Alice Rosenbaum, was born on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her family was relatively wealthy; Rand's father was a self-made man who owned a pharmacy. According to her biographer Barbara Branden in The Passion of Ayn Rand, Rand was a precocious child who spent much time among adults, gathering information about the world around her. At the age of nine, she had already developed a strong fascination about the battle between good and evil, as well as her notion of the characteristics of the ideal man. "Intelligence, independence, courage. The heroic...