Anthem

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg, Rand graduated from high school in the Crimea in 1921. After the Russian Revolution, aged 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy at Petrograd State University, majoring in history. She was introduced to the writings of Aristotle and Plato, and she also studied the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche. After graduating in 1924, she studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment she wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, which became her first published work. Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago in 1925 moved to the United States in 1926 and, whilst struggling to establish herself as a writer in New York City, supported herself with odd jobs, including working as a waitress, an office clerk, and as a reader for film companies. Rand’s first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932. This was followed by the courtroom drama The Night of January 16th, which ran on Broadway in the season of 1935-1936, and the novels We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her nonfiction works and by giving talks to students at institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard. She received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Lewis & Clark College in 1963. She also began delivering annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, responding afterward to questions from the audience. Rand died in Manhattan on March 6, 1982, aged 77.