American · 1905–1982
Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, she lived through the Russian Revolution, studied at Petrograd State University, and left the Soviet Union in 1926. She settled in the United States and worked briefly in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Her novels We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) present her view that individual reason, self-interest and free-market capitalism are moral ideals. The Fountainhead made her famous, and Atlas Shrugged became her best-known and best-selling book. She named her philosophy Objectivism and developed it in essays and in magazines such as The Objectivist. Critics often dismissed her fiction, but her ideas shaped the American libertarian and conservative movements, and her books still sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year. She died in New York City in 1982.