Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand , 1905-82, American writer, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. She came to the United States in 1926 and worked for many years as a screenwriter. Her novels are romantic and dramatic, and they espouse a philosophy of rational self-interest that opposes the collective of the modern welfare state. Her best-known novels include The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In For the New Intellectual (1961) she summarized her philosophy, which she called "objectivism."

Bibliography: See the memoir by N. Branden (1989); biography by B. Branden (1987); study by J. T. Baker (1987); her letters, ed. by M. S. Berliner (1995), and her journals, ed. by D. Harriman (1997).

Rand, Ayn. See Night of January 16.

Rand, Ayn (1905–82), Russian‐born novelist, graduated from the University of Leningrad, came to the U.S. (1926), where she was naturalized. Her first writing was a mystery play, The Night of January 16th (1935), but later works shows her deep concern with the theme of extreme individualism. Her first novel, We, the Living (1936), depicts young Russian individualists trapped and destroyed by totalitarian dictatorship. Anthem (England, 1938; U.S., 1946) is a short novel about a heroic dissenter in a future monolithic and collectivized state. The Fountainhead (1943) is a long biographical novel praising the independence of an architect ostensibly modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright. Atlas Shrugged (1957) treats the value of a superior concept of individualism related to people who plan a new society based on the oath “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask any other man to live for mine.” For the New Intellectual (1961) collects the philosophic passages of these four novels to present her theory of Objectivism, which is antiromantic and antialtruistic in its fervent appeal to a code of “rational self‐interest.” The Romantic Manifesto (1969) is her “philosophy of literature.”