Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a Russian-American novelist and philosopher, the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the originator of Objectivism, the philosophical system she developed to give explicit form to the view of man dramatised in her fiction.

“My philosophy, in essence, is 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 his only absolute.”
~ Ayn Rand, "About the Author", Atlas Shrugged

Russia

She was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg on 2 February 1905, the eldest daughter of a pharmacist. The family business was confiscated by the Bolsheviks when she was twelve, an event she later identified as the origin of her lifelong opposition to collectivism. She studied history at the University of Petrograd, graduating in 1924, and afterwards enrolled at the State Technicum for Screen Arts.

She read Aristotle and Nietzsche as a student, and later acknowledged an intellectual debt to the first while explicitly rejecting the second. Of the philosophers she wrote about, she regarded Immanuel Kant as the most destructive.

America

Granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, she arrived in the United States in February 1926 at the age of twenty-one and never returned. She took the name Ayn Rand, in part to protect the family she had left behind. Within months she had gone to Hollywood, where she worked as an extra and in a series of odd jobs while learning to write in English — a language she had not grown up in, and which she went on to use with more precision than most native writers of her generation.

On the set of Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings she engineered a meeting with the actor Frank O'Connor. They married in 1929 and remained married until his death in 1979.

Her first sale was the screenplay Red Pawn, bought by Universal in 1932. The courtroom play Night of January 16th followed, reaching Broadway in 1935 with a gimmick that suited her: the jury was drawn from the audience, and the ending changed with its verdict.

The novels

We The Living (1936) — set in Soviet Russia, and the closest she came to autobiography. It sold poorly at first and was filmed in Italy during the war without her knowledge or permission.
Anthem (1938) — a novella, first published in Britain, set in a future that has lost the word "I".
The Fountainhead (1943) — rejected by a dozen publishers before Bobbs-Merrill took it. It became a word-of-mouth bestseller and made her financially independent. Its theme is individualism in a man's soul rather than in politics.
Atlas Shrugged (1957) — the work she considered her magnum opus and her most complete statement of the philosophy in fiction, containing in Galt's speech the fullest presentation of the ethics she had published to that point.

Atlas Shrugged was widely and harshly reviewed, and sold steadily anyway. In a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, respondents named it the book that had most influenced their lives after the Bible — a self-selected readers' poll rather than a measure of literary standing, but an unusual result for a novel of that age.

The non-fiction

After Atlas Shrugged Rand largely stopped writing fiction and spent the remaining twenty-five years of her life presenting the philosophy directly, through the periodicals The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter, and through the essay collections drawn from them:

For The New Intellectual (1961)
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) — the ethics
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) — the politics
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1966–67) — the theory of concept formation
The Romantic Manifesto (1969) — the aesthetics
Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)

Material published after her death includes The Early Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction and The Art of Nonfiction, along with her journals and letters.

The break with the Brandens

Rand's association with Nathaniel Branden, who founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute to teach her philosophy, ended in 1968. Rand's public statement gave as her reason his conduct and his misrepresentations to her; the Brandens' later accounts described the end of a long affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden, conducted with the knowledge of both their spouses.

The episode is argued about on the forum more than any other biographical question, usually in the form of whether it discredits the philosophy. Objectivism's own position on that is unambiguous — an argument stands or falls on its content, and the character of the person making it is a separate question. See Ad hominem.

Death and legacy

Rand died on 6 March 1982 in New York and was buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York. She named Leonard Peikoff her legal and intellectual heir; he founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985. The United States Postal Service issued a stamp in her honour in 1999.

Her books have continued to sell in large numbers, and she remains almost absent from academic philosophy while widely read outside it — a gap her defenders and critics explain very differently.

Common misunderstandings

That she took Social Security and was therefore a hypocrite. Rand addressed the general question in "The Question of Scholarships": a person forced to pay into a system may take back what was taken from him without endorsing it, since the money was not voluntarily given. Whether that resolves the charge is argued at length on the forum.
That Objectivism is a cult. The claim usually rests on the atmosphere of the 1960s New York circle rather than on the content of the philosophy, which holds independent judgment as a cardinal virtue. See Independence.
That her praise of a 1920s criminal reveals her real ethics. Her private journals contain admiring notes about the public defiance of William Hickman, written when she was in her early twenties and planning a novel that was never finished. Nothing in the published philosophy sanctions the initiation of force, which it treats as the fundamental evil. See Initiation of force.
That she was a libertarian or a conservative. She rejected both labels — the first for advancing political conclusions without a philosophical base, the second for grounding capitalism in tradition or religion. See Libertarianism and Religion.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "About the Author", appendix to Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Question of Scholarships", The Objectivist (1966).
Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Doubleday, 1986.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Dutton, 1991.

External links