Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand is an author who has personally fascinated me since high school. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At nine years old she started her writing career. She admired Victor Hugo and saw herself, like him, a European writer, not a collectivist Russian writer. In high school she witnessed the Kerensky Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. She escaped the fighting by moving with her family to Crimea. With the victory of the Communist brought hard times around for her family. In her last year of high school she studied American history which became her model of what free men could be. 

She attended the University of Petrograd where she studied philosophy and history. She graduated in 1924 and found that the communists had infiltrated life once again. She found comfort in Viennese operettas and Western films. In 1925 she was granted permission to travel to America which was suppose to be short, though she was determined never to return to Soviet Russia. 

While in America she moved to Hollywood to try her hand at screenwriting. After working various jobs in Hollywood on sets. Her first book We The Living was completed in 1934 but was rejected by several publishers, but eventually was published in 1936. This was the most autobiographical of all her novels, being based on her years under Soviet tyranny.  

She published many other famous work such as the Fountainhead, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged. She often depicted a hero as being the "ideal man" or how a man "could be and ought to be." Her philosophy developed and came into full bloom in Atlas Shrugged which integrated: ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Her philosophy became known as Objectivism a "philosophy for living on earth." 

Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982. Her books are still widely known and thousands of copies are sold a year. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.