Introduction


Ayn Rand

Some readers love her, some readers hate her, but just about everyone can admire Ayn Rand’s tenacity. At the young age of nine, Rand made up her mind to be a fiction writer, and she proceeded to do just that, becoming in the process both a philosopher and a pop-culture icon. Born in Russia, she witnessed the Kerensky and Bolshevik Revolutions before her family moved to Crimea to escape harm. In college, Rand discovered Western films and began studying screenwriting. In 1926, she moved to Hollywood, began working at various film jobs, and soon sold her first screenplay. Rand’s first commercial success, however, came with the novel The Fountainhead in 1935 and was followed by Atlas Shrugged, part literary endeavor and part philosophical treatise, in 1957.

Essential Facts

  1. Legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille gave Rand her first job as an extra and then a script reader on his movie King of Kings. It was only her second day in Hollywood.
  2. The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers before finally being picked up in 1935. It has since sold over six million copies—about 100,000 a year.
  3. Rand met her husband, Frank O’Connor, on her second week in Hollywood. They were married for 50 years, right up until his death.
  4. Rand’s major philosophy in life was objectivism, which she described as “a philosophy for living on earth” but critics call an extreme, hyper-selfish form of individualism. She spent the latter part of her life and career writing about and lecturing on objectivism.
  5. In Atlas Shrugged, her last work of fiction, Rand uses the cigarette as a symbol of human intellect—glowing, burning, bright. A smoker throughout her life, she would eventually lose a lung to cancer before she died in 1982.