The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Rand, Ayn
Rand, Ayn( 1905–82), Russian-born novelist, graduated from the University of Leningrad, came to the U.S. (1926), where she was naturalized. Her first writing was a mystery play, The Night of January 16th (1935), but later works shows her deep concern with the theme of extreme individualism. Her first novel, We, the Living (1936), depicts young Russian individualists trapped and destroyed by totalitarian dictatorship. Anthem (England, 1938; U.S., 1946) is a short novel about a heroic dissenter in a future monolithic and collectivized state. The Fountainhead (1943) is a long biographical novel praising the independence of an architect ostensibly modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright. Atlas Shrugged (1957) treats the value of a superior concept of individualism related to people who plan a new society based on the oath “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask any other man to live for mine.” For the New...
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