Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was a major intellectual of the twentieth century. Born in Russia in 1905
and educated there, she immigrated to the United States after graduating from
university. Upon becoming proficient in English and establishing herself as a writer
of fiction, she became well-known as a passionate advocate of a philosophy she called
Objectivism. This philosophy is in the Aristotelian tradition, with that tradition’s
emphasis upon metaphysical naturalism, empirical reason in epistemology, and self-
realization in ethics. Her political philosophy is in the classical liberal tradition, with
that tradition’s emphasis upon individualism, the constitutional protection of
individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and limited government. She wrote
both technical and popular works of philosophy, and she presented her philosophy
in both fictional and nonfictional forms. Her philosophy has influenced several
generations of academics and public intellectuals, and has had widespread popular
appeal.

Regarding human nature, Rand said, “Man is a being of self-made soul.” Rand
believes human beings are not born in sin or with destructive desires; nor do they
necessarily acquire them in the course of growing to maturity. Instead one is born
morally tabula rasa (a blank slate), and through one’s choices and actions one
acquires one’s character traits and habits. Having chronic desires to steal, rape, or
kill others is the result of mistaken development and the acquisition of bad habits,
just as are chronic laziness or the habit of eating too much junk food. And just as one
is not born lazy but can by one’s choices develop oneself into a person of vigor or
sloth, so also one is not born antisocial but can by one’s choices develop oneself into
a person of cooperativeness or conflict.

Ayn Rand’s life was often as colorful as those of her heroes in her best-selling
novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand first made her name as a novelist,
publishing We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943), and her magnum
opus Atlas Shrugged (1957). These philosophical novels embodied themes she
subsequently developed in nonfiction form in a series of essays and books written in
the 1960s and 1970s.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905, Rand was raised in a middle-
class family. As a child, she loved storytelling, and at age nine she decided to become
a writer. In school she showed academic promise, particularly in mathematics. Her
family was devastated by the communist revolution of 1917, both by the social
upheavals that the revolution and the ensuing civil war brought and by her father’s
pharmacy being confiscated by the Soviets. The family moved to the Crimea to
recover financially and to escape the harshness of life the revolution brought to St.
Petersburg. They later returned to Petrograd (the new name given to St. Petersburg
by the Soviets), where Rand was to attend university.

At the University of Petrograd, Rand concentrated her studies on history, with

secondary focuses on philosophy and literature. At university, she was repelled by
the dominance of communist ideas and strong-arm tactics that suppressed free
inquiry and discussion. As a youth, she had been repelled by the communists’
political program, and now an adult, she was also more fully aware of the destructive
effects that the revolution had had on Russian society more broadly.

Having studied American history and politics at university, and having long been an
admirer of Western plays, music, and movies, she became an admirer of American
individualism, vigor, and optimism, seeing them as the opposites of Russian
collectivism, decay, and gloom. Not believing, however, that she would be free under
the Soviet system to write the kinds of books she wanted to write, she resolved to
leave Russia and go to America.

Rand graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924. She then enrolled at the
State Institute for Cinema Arts in order to study screenwriting. In 1925, she finally
received permission from the Soviet authorities to leave the country in order to visit
relatives in the United States. Officially, her visit was to be brief; Rand, however, had
already decided not to return to the Soviet Union.

After several stops in western European cities, Rand arrived in New York City in
February 1926. From New York, she traveled on to Chicago, Illinois, where she spent
the next six months living with relatives, learning English, and developing ideas for
stories and movies. She had decided to become a screenwriter, and, having received
an extension to her visa, she left for Hollywood, California.

On Rand’s second day in Hollywood, an event occurred that was worthy of her
fiction. She was spotted by Cecil B. DeMille, one of Hollywood’s leading directors,
while she was standing at the gate of his studio. She had recognized him as he was
passing by in his car, and he had noticed her staring at him. He stopped to ask why
she was staring, and Rand explained that she had recently arrived from Russia, that
she had long been passionate about Hollywood movies, and that she dreamed of
being a screenwriter. DeMille was then working on “The King of Kings,” and gave
her a ride to his movie set and signed her on as an extra. During her second week at
DeMille’s studio, another significant event occurred: Rand met Frank O’Connor, a
young actor also working as an extra. Rand and O’Connor were married in 1929, and
they remained married for fifty years until his death in 1979.

Rand worked for DeMille as a reader of scripts and struggled financially while
working on her own writing. She also held a variety of non-writing jobs until in 1932
she was able to sell her first screenplay, “Red Pawn,” to Universal Studios. Also in
1932 her first stage play, “Night of January 16th,” was produced in Hollywood and
later on Broadway.

Rand had been working for years on her first significant novel, We the Living, and
finished it in 1933. However, for several years it was rejected by various publishers,
until in 1936 it was published by Macmillan in the U.S. and Cassell in England. Rand
described We the Living as the most autobiographical of her novels, its theme being
the brutality of life under communist rule in Russia. We the Living did not receive a
positive reaction from American reviewers and intellectuals. It was published in the
1930s, a decade sometimes called the “Red Decade,” during which American
intellectuals were often pro-communist and respectful and admiring of the Soviet
experiment.
Rand’s next major project was The Fountainhead, which she had begun to work on in
1935. While the theme of We the Living was political, the theme of The
Fountainhead was ethical, focusing on individualist themes of independence and
integrity. The novel’s hero, the architect Howard Roark, is Rand’s first embodiment
of her ideal man, the man who lives on a principled and heroic scale of achievement.
As with We the Living, Rand had difficulties getting The Fountainhead published.
Twelve publishers rejected it before it was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1943. Again
not well received by reviewers and intellectuals, the novel nonetheless became a best
seller, primarily through word-of-mouth recommendation. The Fountainhead made
Rand famous as an exponent of individualist ideas, and its continuing to sell well
brought her financial security. Warner Brothers produced a movie version of the
novel in 1949, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, for which Rand wrote the
screenplay.
In 1946, Rand began work on her most ambitious novel, Atlas Shrugged. At the time,
she was working part-time as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis. In 1951, she
and her husband moved to New York City, where she began to work full-time
on Atlas. Published by Random House in 1957, Atlas Shrugged is her most complete
expression of her literary and philosophical vision. Dramatized in the form of a
mystery about a man who stopped the motor of the world, the plot and characters
embody the political and ethical themes first developed in We the Living and The
Fountainhead and integrates them into a comprehensive philosophy including
metaphysics, epistemology, economics, and the psychology of love and sex.
Atlas Shrugged was an immediate best seller and Rand’s last work of fiction. Her
novels had expressed philosophical themes, although Rand considered herself
primarily a novelist and only secondarily a philosopher. The creation of plots and
characters and the dramatization of achievements and conflicts were her central
purposes in writing fiction, rather than presenting an abstracted and didactic set of
philosophical theses.
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, however, had attracted to Rand many readers
who were strongly interested in the philosophical ideas the novels embodied and in
pursuing them further. Among the earliest of those with whom Rand became
associated and who later became prominent were psychologist Nathaniel Branden
and economist Alan Greenspan, later Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Her
interactions with these and several other key individuals were partly responsible for
Rand’s turning from fiction to nonfiction writing in order to develop her philosophy
more systematically.
From 1962 until 1976, Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy, now named
“Objectivism.” Her essays during this period were mostly published in a series of
periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, published from 1962 to 1965; the larger
periodical The Objectivist, published from 1966 to 1971; and then The Ayn Rand Letter,
published from 1971 to 1976. The essays written for these periodicals form the core
material for a series of nine nonfiction books published during Rand’s lifetime. These
books develop Rand’s philosophy in all its major categories and apply it to cultural
issues. Perhaps the most significant of these books are The Virtue of Selfishness, which
develops her ethical theory, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, devoted to political and
economic theory, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a systematic presentation
of her theory of concepts, and The Romantic Manifesto, a theory of aesthetics.
During the 1960s, Rand’s most significant professional relationship was with
Nathaniel Branden. Branden, author of The Psychology of Self-Esteem and later
known as a leader in the self-esteem movement in psychology, wrote many essays on
philosophical and psychological topics that were published in Rand’s books and
periodicals. He was the founder and head of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the
leading Objectivist institution of the 1960s. Based in New York City, the Nathaniel
Branden Institute published with Rand’s sanction numerous periodicals and
pamphlets and sponsored many lectures in New York that were then distributed on
tape around the United States and the rest of the world. The rapid growth of the
Nathaniel Branden Institute and the Objectivist movement came to a halt in 1968
when, for both professional and personal reasons, Rand and Branden parted ways.
Rand continued to write and lecture consistently until she stopped publishing The
Ayn Rand Letter in 1976. Thereafter she wrote and lectured less as her husband’s
health declined, leading to his death in 1979, and as her own health began to decline.
Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.