Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. Her father's pharmacy was seized by the Bolsheviks after the revolution of 1917, and she studied history at the University of Petrograd before emigrating to the United States in 1926. She worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and in the studio wardrobe department, and married the actor Frank O'Connor in 1929. Her first novel, We the Living (1936), drew on life in Soviet Russia, and the short novel Anthem (1938) imagines a collective future in which the word 'I' has been forgotten. The Fountainhead (1943), about an uncompromising architect named Howard Roark, became a bestseller, as did Atlas Shrugged (1957), in which inventors and industrialists go on strike. In her later years she wrote nonfiction essays developing her philosophy, which she called Objectivism, emphasizing reason, individual rights and free markets. She died in New York City in 1982.

Ayn Rand is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: An atheist whose philosophy rejected religious metaphysics. Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy