Ayn Rand

Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, the eldest of three daughters of a Jewish pharmacist whose shop was nationalised by the Bolsheviks when she was twelve, she grew up watching the family fortune confiscated by the new regime. After the revolution they fled to the Crimea, returned to Petrograd, and nearly starved through the famine years. She was among the first women admitted to Petrograd State University, studying history and screenwriting, and in 1925 obtained a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She never went back. She arrived in New York in February 1926, took the name Ayn Rand for her writing, and made her way to Hollywood, where a chance encounter with Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra and a junior screenwriter. She met the actor Frank O'Connor on the set of The King of Kings and married him in 1929. Her courtroom play Night of January 16th, with a jury drawn from the audience, ran on Broadway in 1935. We the Living (1936), her semi-autobiographical novel of Soviet Petrograd, and the dystopian novella Anthem (1938) found small readerships. The Fountainhead (1943), the story of the architect Howard Roark, was rejected by twelve publishers and then sold six million copies. Atlas Shrugged (1957) ran to twelve hundred pages and laid out the philosophy she called Objectivism: rational self-interest, laissez-faire capitalism, art as romantic realism, an ethics opposed to altruism. She spent her last decades writing essays and editing The Objectivist. She died of heart failure in her Manhattan apartment on March 6, 1982, at the age of seventy-seven.

On her second day in Hollywood, Ayn Rand stood outside Cecil B. DeMille's studio gate. DeMille drove past, stopped, and offered the stranger a ride to the set of The King of Kings, hiring her first as an extra and then as a script reader.