Ayn Rand, 1943 (portrait from the first-edition jacket of The Fountainhead). Source · Public domain
About Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand (1905–1982), born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, lived through the Bolshevik Revolution, left the Soviet Union in 1926 and settled in the United States, where she worked as a Hollywood screenwriter before turning to novels. She called her philosophy Objectivism: reason as the only means of knowledge, rational self-interest as the basis of ethics, and laissez-faire capitalism as the only just social system. Her novels remain widely read and widely disputed.
1938 (revised 1946) · Early 20th Century · Novella
Anthem is a short dystopian novel set in a future collective society that has lost electricity, science and even the word "I". People are known by names such as Equality 7-2521 and refer to themselves only as "we".
The Fountainhead follows the career of Howard Roark, a young architect who designs buildings according to his own principles and refuses to imitate historical styles or to compromise with clients, committees and critics. Ayn Rand presents him as her ideal of the independent creator, and she sets him against a cast of characters who, in her terms, live through and for others.
Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's longest novel and the fullest dramatization of the philosophy she later called Objectivism. It is set in an unnamed near-future United States whose economy is sliding into collapse as government controls tighten and the country's most able industrialists, scientists and artists mysteriously disappear.
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