Why did Ayn Rand change her name?
Birth name Alisa Rosenbaum Turned twenty-one during her voyage to America, and also changed her name, in part to protect her family back in Soviet Russia. “Ayn” (rhymes with “mine”) came from a Finnish author. The exact origin of her last name is uncertain; however, in 1936, she told the New York Evening Post that ‘Rand is an abbreviation of my Russian surname.’ An oft-repeated story claims that Ayn Rand took her last name from her Remington Rand typewriter while she was living in Chicago in 1926, but this is not true because the Remington and Rand companies did not merge until 1927; ‘Rand’ did not appear on their (or any) typewriters until the early 1930s. She kept her initials A.R.; explaining later “Two kinds of people keep their initials when they change their names – criminals and writers,” to her proteg Nathaniel Branden (himself born Nathan Blumenthal).
