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Ayn Rand
1905–1982 · 77 years Tier II
Her father's pharmacy was seized when she was twelve
She was Alisa Rosenbaum, eldest of three daughters of a Saint Petersburg pharmacist, and she was 12 when the Bolsheviks nationalized her father's shop. The family fled to Yevpatoria in Crimea. She finished school there in June 1921 and came back to a Petrograd where they sometimes came close to starving. At the university she read history, was purged as a bourgeois student, and was reinstated only after visiting foreign scientists complained. She graduated in October 1924. A year at the state film school followed, and her first published piece was a class assignment about the Polish actress Pola Negri. In late 1925 she was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She landed in New York on February 19, 1926, and never went back.
Hollywood took her on as an extra in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings, then as a junior screenwriter. She met Frank O'Connor on that set and married him on April 15, 1929. Night of January 16th, staged in 1934 and on Broadway in 1935, drew a jury from the audience every night and played whichever of two endings it voted for. Twelve publishers turned down The Fountainhead before Bobbs-Merrill took it, and only because the editor Archibald Ogden threatened to quit. It made her famous in 1943. Atlas Shrugged followed in 1957, and after that she abandoned fiction for 25 years of newsletters, lectures and a movement built on a philosophy she named Objectivism: reason as the only route to knowledge, self-interest as a virtue, laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral system, and no God anywhere in it.
In 1928 she sketched a superman hero for an unwritten novel, modeled partly on William Edward Hickman, a murderer whose trial she was following, and spent later decades insisting she owed Nietzsche nothing. Prescribed Benzedrine while finishing The Fountainhead, she took amphetamines for roughly 30 years. In 1954 she began an affair with Nathaniel Branden, 25 years younger, and reasoned both spouses into consenting. Jennifer Burns concludes Frank O'Connor was hit hardest. When she learned in 1968 that Branden had hidden a lover, she cut him off and the institute teaching her philosophy closed. In 1976, after a career spent calling public welfare immoral, she claimed Social Security and Medicare with help from her lawyers' representative. She never got her family out of Russia: her father died in 1939, her mother and one sister in the siege of Leningrad.
She died of heart failure at her New York apartment on March 6, 1982, with a six-foot dollar sign in flowers at the funeral. Her will made Leonard Peikoff her heir. He founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985, and a 1990 split produced what is now the Atlas Society. Sales passed 37 million copies, and a 1991 Library of Congress survey put Atlas Shrugged second to the Bible among the books readers called most influential. Academic philosophy has mostly declined. Alan Wolfe called her a nonperson among academics in 2012, and the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies folded in 2023. Her most concrete legacy sat in her living room in the 1950s and later ran the Federal Reserve.
Lifespan
Ayn Rand's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Night of January 16th
other
A courtroom play with a jury drawn from the audience and two possible endings 1934 -
We the Living
book
Her semi-autobiographical first novel, which went out of print in America 1936 -
Anthem
book
Published in England first, in America in 1946 1938 -
The Fountainhead
book
Rejected by 12 publishers before an editor staked his job on it 1943 -
Atlas Shrugged
book
Her best seller and her last novel 1957 -
The Virtue of Selfishness
book
The ethics stated directly, without a plot 1964
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1917 aged ~12 The Bolsheviks nationalize her father's pharmacy The family fled to Yevpatoria in Crimea during the civil war.
- October 1924 aged 19 Graduates from Leningrad State University in history She had been purged as a bourgeois student and reinstated after foreign scientists objected.
- February 19, 1926 aged 21 Arrives in New York on a visa to visit relatives
- April 15, 1929 aged 24 Marries Frank O'Connor, whom she met on a DeMille set
- March 3, 1931 aged 26 Becomes an American citizen
- 1943 aged ~38 The Fountainhead is published and makes her famous Twelve publishers had turned it down.
- 1957 aged ~52 Atlas Shrugged is published to mostly hostile reviews Whittaker Chambers attacked it in National Review and she cut off the magazine's editor.
- 1968 aged ~63 Breaks with Nathaniel Branden and closes the institute
- March 6, 1982 aged 77 Dies of heart failure at her apartment in New York
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