Ayn Rand Biography
Ayn Rand’s tenacity can be admired by just about everyone, whether they love her or hate her. 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 1943 and was followed by Atlas Shrugged, part literary endeavor and part philosophical treatise, in 1957.
Facts and Trivia
- 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.
- The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers before finally being picked up in 1943. It has since sold over six million copies—about 100,000 a year.
- Rand met her husband, Frank O’Connor, on her second week in Hollywood. They were married for fifty years, right up until his death.
- 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.
- 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.
- Rand refused to spay or neuter her cats because “unlike humans, cats cannot choose to go against nature or mold it to their wishes.” A Random House employee who visited her reported that the stench in her apartment was awful.
- According to the book Letters of Ayn Rand, Ayn should rhyme with "line" when pronounced correctly.
Criticism by Ayn Rand
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.