Ayn Rand was a Russian-American author, screenwriter, and advocate for Objectivism, her philosophy of reason, independent thinking, rational self-interest, individual rights, laissez-faire capitalism, and freedom.

 

She’s most famously known for her two best-selling novels, “The Fountainhead,” published in 1943, and “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957.

 

Early Life

 

Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsarist dynasty in the Russian Revolution in 1917, the family business was seized, and they were forced to move to Crimea, where they lived in poverty.

 

The tragic setback to her family profoundly impacted a very impressionable Alissa and is credited as the genesis of her aversion to government interference with individual freedoms.

 

After finishing high school, Alissa returned to St. Petersburg and enrolled in Petrograd University, where she studied history until 1924. After graduating, she went on to the State Institute for Cinematography with the dream of becoming a screenwriter.

 

In 1926 Alissa seized a chance to visit the United States under the guise of studying cinema techniques that could be applied back in the USSR. Upon arrival in America, she adopted the name, Ayn Rand.

 

In time, Rands’s career began to pick up steam. She published her first novel, titled “We the Living,” in 1936 and followed that success with the novella “Anthem,” published in 1938.

 

The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged

 

On the heels of her novella, Ayn spent several years writing her next novel, “The Fountainhead.” The book dramatically accentuates Rand’s core belief system embodied by the protagonist, architect Howard Roark, of the rejection of conventional architectural norms and goes to the extreme length of blowing up his own work to preserve his sense of individualism.

 

Ayn’s subsequent and most famous success came from the massive 1,000+ page tome, “Atlas Shrugged.” The novel paints a dystopian future where prominent capitalists, weary of being exploited, opt out of a bureaucratic collectivist nightmare after discovering the identity of “John Galt.”

 

One can’t help but theorize that this book might be a painful historical reference to her experience as a young child when the Bolsheviks seized her father’s pharmacy. The seizure effectively cast her family into an economic hell because he dared to attain his dream of running a successful business and reaping the benefits without interference from the state.

 

Objectivism

 

In the 1950s, Ayn refined her individualistic philosophy, coining the term “Objectivism,” as a belief that a concrete reality exists and holds intrinsic truths to discover, and ultimately in the moral value implicit in the pursuit of one’s own self-interest.

 

Ayn advanced the radical idea that morally, Objectivism is the advocation of the virtues of rational self-interest, like independent thought, productivity, justice, integrity, and accountability. Culturally, Objectivism is the advocation of science, industrialization, objective education, romantic art, and reason. Politically, Objectivism is the advocation of laissez-faire capitalism, individual rights, and limited government.

 

She presented her philosophy in many of her fiction and nonfiction books, apart from her best-sellers, including:

 

• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• For the New Intellectual

• Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

• Philosophy: Who Needs It

• The Ayn Rand Letter (newsletter)

• The Romantic Manifesto

• The Virtue of Selfishness

 

Rand encapsulated Objectivism as “a philosophy for living on earth.” Its core underpinnings draw from the observable facts that constitute reality and the discernible conditions for life and contentment.