Who was Ayn Rand?
Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, Rand was the first of three daughters. Highly independent and disinterested in her mother’s homemaking and social activities, Alisa seemed born with a desire to seek intellectual meaning. While she sometimes spoke with her pharmacist father about issues and ideas, her precocious intellect merely made her something of a trophy child to Mrs. Rosenbaum, to be shown off in her flourishing bourgeois social circle. Rand’s biographer and close associate in later life, Barbara Branden, records Rand’s own recollection of her childhood: “Progressively, as my ideas developed, I had more and more a sense of loneliness. . . . I was enormously unhappy with my position at home; I did not like being a child, I did not like being attached to a family” (The Passion of Ayn Rand). The Rosenbaum household was Jewish but practiced few Jewish traditions, although Alisa’s father conceded that “one never can tell” when it comes to the concept of God. Her
Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, she was the daughter of an entrepreneur whose business was seized by the Bolsheviks. In 1925 she fled to America, changed her name to Rand, and began working for Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood, before moving to New York to become a writer. She wrote two short novels before gaining popularity in 1943 with The Fountainhead, the story of an architect driven by the “second-handers” to blow up his own building. But it was Atlas Shrugged that made her a national institution and gave the world a new philosophy, known as Objectivism. What is Objectivism? Rand described it as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” The only social system consistent with this morality, Rand insisted, is pure, unfettered capitalism, and the only function of government is the protection of individual rights.
Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg, her father was an entrepreneur whose business was seized by the Bolsheviks. In 1925 she fled to America, changed her name to Rand, and began working for Cecil B DeMille in Hollywood, before moving to New York to become a writer. She wrote two short novels before gaining popularity in 1943 with The Fountain-head, the story of a fanatical architect driven by the “second-handers” to blow up his own building. But it was Atlas Shrugged, published 14 years later, that made her a national institution and gave the world, or at least the US, a new philosophy. What was the name of that philosophy? Objectivism, which she described as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”. The only social system consistent with this morality, Rand insisted, is pure, unfettered capitalism, and the only function of g
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a novelist-philosopher whose writings have sparked an intellectual revolution that is having a growing impact on the culture. Born in Russia, she emigrated to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen, by choice and intellectual conviction. Over the years her writing won her the admiration of millions of fans. Atlas Shrugged (1957) was her last work of fiction and greatest achievement: it is a novel that dramatizes—with irresistible logic and suspenseful action—her unique philosophy in the form of an intellectual mystery story. In the final decades of her life, Ayn Rand turned to nonfiction, writing and lecturing on her philosophy, Objectivism, which she characterized as a “philosophy for living on earth.” From 1962 to 1976 she published and edited her own periodicals. Taking Objectivism as her frame of reference, she addressed issues ranging from abortion and the moon landing to the lessons of the Vietnam War and the nature of human knowledge. [A
Plus, Rand wrote many phrases that perfectly define the human psyche such as: “He did not have the strength to feel – not even to suffer.” “The woman in Romette 9, Car No. 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge.” “A rational process is a moral process.” “Thinking is man’s only basic virtue.” “Substitute motion for thought.” “If you have not heard it, my dear old-fashioned friends, it has now been proven that the rational is the insane.
