biography
| name: |
Rand, Ayn
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| |
originally Alissa Rosenbum
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pronunciation:
[iyn]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1905–82)
|
| biography:
| Writer and philosopher, born in St Petersburg, Russia. As an adolescent she saw the negative side of the Bolshevik Revolution. After graduating from the University of Petrograd (1924), she went to the USA (1926), which she regarded as the ‘country of the individual’, becoming a citizen in 1931. Starting as a screenwriter and dramatist, she first won fame for her novel, The Fountainhead (1943), which was also filmed. Atlas Shrugged (1957), a novel in form, incorporated her philosophy of ‘Objectivism’, which stresses objective reality, reason, self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism. She advanced her ideas in a series of books including The Virtue of Selfishness (1957) and through an institute run by a follower, Nathaniel Brandon. Outspoken and assertive to the end, she named Leonard Peikoff her ‘intellectual heir’. |
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