In 1949 a film version came out Rand wrote the screenplay, and kept it faithful to the book. Critics weren’t always kind to the tome of 700 pages plus, but readers - and Hollywood - felt otherwise. It became a huge best-seller, with millions of copies in print around the globe in a short time.

The Fountainhead took her seven years to write, and after multiple rejections, it was published in 1943.

In 1936 Rand published her first novel, We the Living, which told of her life in in the Soviet Union. She married a bit-part actor, Frank O’Connor, when her visa ran out in 1929. Making her way to Hollywood she worked various jobs before she finally became a screenwriter.

Soon after, she changed her name to Ayn Rand. In 1926, she left Russia for the United States, ostensibly to visit relatives, and vowed to stay. Petersburg) after the Revolution to attend college, where she studied history, politics, and law. This early experience was at the heart of her scorn held for Collectivism, the system of ownership and control of production by the government.Īlisa Rosenbaum returned to Petrograd (formerly St. In the convening years, fraught and chaotic, her father’s business was nationalized. She knew early that she wanted to be a writer. The Rosenbaum family fled to Crimea, a Russian state. Petersburg, or so she claimed later, and witnessed men being shot in the street. She was against what what was at the time called “women’s lib,” now referred to as second-wave feminism.Īt the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the 12-year old Alisa looked out her bedroom window in St. She championed rugged individualism in her novels and nonfiction writings.Īnd though she created strong female characters, their initial sexual encounters with their male counterparts bordered on rape. The Virtue of Selfishness, the title of one of her best-known works of nonfiction, sums up what made Rand tick. Her philosophy, as she defined it was, “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.” Her novels’ leading men were mouthpieces for her objectivist views - especially Howard Roark in The Fountainhead and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. Later, as a widely read (if not critically acclaimed) author, she became known for ponderous novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which were based on the philosophical tenets of Objectivism, which she developed. Originally named Alisa Rosenbaum, she was a bookish child who loved stories and started writing her own when still quite young. Ayn Rand (Febru– March 6, 1982), American author born in St.

Rand author atlas shrugged