Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, and screenwriter whose 50-year writing career produced two defining 20th-century American philosophical novels — The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) — and the philosophical system she named Objectivism. She was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, into a Russian-Jewish merchant family. Her father Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum was a successful Saint Petersburg pharmacist whose business was nationalized following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Her education at Petrograd State University (graduated in social pedagogy, 1924) was shaped by the family's progressive impoverishment under the early Soviet regime. Her 1925 successful application for a six-month visa to visit her American Chicago relatives — submitted under the pretext of researching American film for Soviet cinema — launched her February 1926 emigration to the United States, where she remained for the rest of her life. She adopted the pen name Ayn Rand at her 1926 Hollywood arrival.

Her early American career across the late 1920s and 1930s produced her first novel We the Living (1936, an autobiographical novel set in early-Soviet Petrograd) and her dystopian novella Anthem (1938). Her 1943 novel The Fountainhead — a 700-page novel about uncompromising architect Howard Roark — produced her American commercial breakthrough following multiple publisher rejections. The 1949 King Vidor film adaptation (starring Gary Cooper, with screenplay by Rand herself) extended its cultural reach.

Her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged — a 1,168-page novel that produced her philosophical statement of Objectivism through the speech of fictional character John Galt — has sold over 10 million copies and remains continuously cited as one of the defining 20th-century American philosophical novels. Her subsequent 1957–1982 nonfiction career produced multiple Objectivist philosophical essay collections — particularly The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966). She died on March 6, 1982, at age 77, in New York City.

Her name Ayn was a personally-chosen pen name (pronounced to rhyme with "mine"). Ayn has been a rare but enduring American girls' name across the late 20th century.