Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire ^[1]. Her father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was a pharmacist who had worked his way into the professional middle class, and the family lived comfortably in an apartment above his shop. Alisa was the eldest of three daughters in a largely secular Jewish household ^[2].

She was a precocious child who taught herself to read early and decided at the age of nine that she would become a writer ^[1]. French adventure serials, particularly the fiction of Maurice Champagne, gave her an early taste for heroic protagonists, and she later credited Victor Hugo as the novelist she admired most ^[2].

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 upended the family's life. Her father's pharmacy was confiscated, and the Rosenbaums fled to the Crimea for several years before returning to the renamed Petrograd in reduced circumstances ^[2]. Alisa enrolled at Petrograd State University, where she studied history along with philosophy, graduating in 1924. She then entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting, a choice that reflected her growing fascination with film and with the America she saw on screen ^[1].

In early 1926 she left the Soviet Union on a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, telling officials she would return but privately resolving never to go back ^[2]. She adopted the pen name Ayn Rand around this time and, after a few months in Chicago, moved to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. On one of her first days there she was spotted by the director Cecil B. DeMille, who gave her work as an extra and then as a junior screenwriter on his productions ^[1].

On a DeMille set she met a young actor named Frank O'Connor. The two married in 1929, a union that also secured her ability to remain in the United States; she became a naturalized American citizen in 1931 ^[2]. Through the early 1930s she supported herself with studio jobs, including a stint in the wardrobe department at RKO, while writing fiction at night.

Her first commercial success came in the theater. The courtroom drama Night of January 16th, notable for letting audience members serve as the jury and decide the verdict, ran on Broadway in 1935 ^[1]. Her first novel, We the Living (1936), drew on her Russian years to depict life under Soviet rule; it sold modestly at first but she always described it as the closest thing to an autobiography she would write ^[2]. The short dystopian novella Anthem followed in 1938, published first in Britain.

Rand's breakthrough was The Fountainhead, published in 1943 after roughly a dozen publishers had turned it down ^[1]. The novel follows Howard Roark, an uncompromising modernist architect who refuses to bend his designs to committee taste, and it dramatizes Rand's conviction that the independent creative mind is the engine of human progress. Sales built slowly through word of mouth, then accelerated; the book became a bestseller and was adapted into a 1949 Warner Bros. film starring Gary Cooper, with Rand writing the screenplay herself ^[3].

Her most ambitious work, Atlas Shrugged, appeared in 1957 ^[1]. The sprawling novel imagines the industrialists, inventors, and artists of America going on strike, withdrawing their talents from a society that vilifies them, and it contains a lengthy speech by the character John Galt that lays out Rand's philosophy in full. Reviews were largely hostile, with critics on both the left and the right attacking the book, yet it sold steadily and has remained continuously in print ^[3]. Surveys and sales figures compiled by her estate and publishers indicate that her books together have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide ^[4].

After Atlas Shrugged, Rand turned from fiction to nonfiction, developing the system she named Objectivism. Its core claims are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that reason is the only means of knowledge, that rational self-interest is the proper moral standard, and that laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system consistent with individual rights ^[5]. She elaborated these ideas in essay collections including The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), and in the periodicals The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter ^[1]. Any account of Ayn Rand achievements has to reckon with this dual output: bestselling fiction on one hand, a self-contained philosophical movement on the other.

Rand and Frank O'Connor remained married for fifty years, until his death in 1979; the couple had no children ^[2]. They lived in Hollywood and, from the 1940s, on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley designed by the architect Richard Neutra, before settling permanently in New York City in 1951 ^[3].

In New York, Rand gathered a circle of young admirers who met at her apartment to discuss philosophy; with deliberate irony they called themselves the Collective. Its members included the psychologist Nathaniel Branden and the future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan ^[2]. Branden founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1958 to teach Objectivism through lectures, and for a decade it spread her ideas to thousands of students across the country.

Rand and Branden also conducted a long romantic affair, carried on with the knowledge of both their spouses. When Rand learned in 1968 that Branden had concealed a relationship with another woman, she broke with him publicly and completely, an episode that split the Objectivist movement ^[2]. Biographers describe Rand as brilliant, magnetic, and demanding, quick to cut off friends and followers who deviated from her views ^[6]. She was a lifelong atheist, a chain smoker for much of her adulthood, and a passionate admirer of what she called the American sense of life.

Through the 1960s and 1970s Rand was a visible public intellectual. She lectured at universities including Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, spoke annually at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, and appeared on national television programs, including interviews with Mike Wallace, Johnny Carson, and Phil Donahue ^[1]. She took strong public positions: she opposed the Vietnam War and the military draft while also condemning the New Left, defended abortion rights, and rejected libertarian activists who claimed her as an inspiration, dismissing their movement as unphilosophical ^[5].

Her health declined after surgery for lung cancer in 1974, and the death of her husband in 1979 was a heavy blow ^[2]. She continued to write and lecture, and in her final years she worked on a television miniseries adaptation of Atlas Shrugged that was never completed.

Ayn Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982, at her home in Manhattan, at the age of 77 ^[1]. She was buried beside Frank O'Connor in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York; at her funeral a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign stood beside the coffin, a symbol her followers associated with her celebration of productive achievement ^[2]. Her legal heir, the philosopher Leonard Peikoff, inherited her estate and papers.

Few twentieth-century authors have had a longer commercial afterlife. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year, aided by essay contests and free book programs run by the Ayn Rand Institute, founded by Leonard Peikoff in 1985 to promote her philosophy ^[4]. In a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, respondents ranked Atlas Shrugged among the books that had most influenced their lives ^[3].

Her political influence has been substantial, particularly on the American right and within the libertarian movement she disowned. Politicians, business figures, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have cited her novels as formative, and her name resurfaces in nearly every American debate over the scale of government ^[4]. Alan Greenspan's long association with her kept her ideas near the center of economic policy discussions for decades.

Academic philosophy was slow to engage with her work, and many scholars still regard her arguments as outside the professional mainstream, but that has shifted at the margins: the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies began publishing in 1999, university fellowships devoted to her thought exist at several institutions, and serious biographies by Anne Heller and Jennifer Burns appeared in 2009 ^[6]. Among the enduring Ayn Rand facts is this split verdict: readers keep buying her books in enormous numbers while critics keep contesting her ideas, which is perhaps the kind of argument she would have welcomed. Any Ayn Rand biography ends where she insisted all value begins, with a single independent mind refusing to defer.