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.

Biography

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Ayn Rand, originally Alice Rosenbaum, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. Her upbringing in a privileged family, with a father who was a successful pharmacist, shaped her early perception of the world. She was a bright child, fascinated from a young age by philosophical themes and the notion of the "heroic man," traits that would later define her literary creations.

Early Life and Political Awakening

From her childhood, Rand was acutely aware of the political tensions in Russia, especially despising the rise of communism after the 1917 revolution. Lenin's Bolshevik regime confiscated her family's business and forced them into a precarious existence. These experiences profoundly influenced Rand's views on politics, cementing her belief that politics is inherently a moral issue, and she grew to resist any form of imposed authority.

Education and American Influence

While pursuing a history degree in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, Rand's studies included American history, which she found particularly captivating. She viewed the United States as a bastion of individualism and freedom, which contrasted sharply with the oppressive government she knew in Russia. This admiration for American ideals prompted her to seize the opportunity to visit relatives in the U.S. in 1926, a trip she decided would be a one-way journey.

Literary Aspirations in America

Once in America, Rand embarked on a journey to establish herself as a writer. She initially worked on summarizing stories for Hollywood adaptations and wrote plays, one of which made it to Broadway. Her breakthrough came with the publication of her later works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which garnered her widespread acclaim. These novels, along with her earlier novella Anthem, articulated her critique of communism and laid the groundwork for her philosophy of Objectivism, which celebrated capitalism and individualism.

Foundations of Objectivism

Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, is not just a novel but a manifesto for her Objectivist philosophy. It envisions the collapse of a collectivist society and the rise of a capitalist utopia. In the postscript, she encapsulates Objectivism as viewing "man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with his productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." This philosophy challenges the morality of altruism and champions rational self-interest.

Philosophical Works and Legacy

Rand continued to refine her philosophical ideas through various publications, including The Virtue of Selfishness, a New Concept of Egoism, and her newsletter, The Objectivist. Although she achieved global recognition with her novels, she did not return to fiction after the success of Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand passed away on March 6, 1982. Ironically, the writer who often depicted cigarettes as symbols of enlightenment suffered from lung cancer, which claimed her life shortly before her death.

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