ANCIENT& not so ancient WISDOM
offering a weekly positive perspective

August 26, 2004

"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision."

- Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982)

Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her family lived in an exclusive apartment above the pharmacy shop owned by her father. At age six, she taught herself to read and at nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career after encountering writer Victor Hugo. 

During her high school years, she was eyewitness to the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and she witnessed the first shots of the Bolshevik Revolution in February 1917 from her balcony, which she denounced. The Communist victory brought the confiscation of her family’s property and near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be.  

By the time she graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924 after studying philosophy and history, free inquiry was disappearing under communist rule. Her great pleasure was Western films and plays, and she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting.  

In late 1925, she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia for a visit to relatives in the United States. She arrived in New York City in February 1926 and spent six months with her relatives in Chicago before obtaining an extension to her visa to pursue a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood.  

On her second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During her next week at the studio, she met actor Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929. They were married until his death fifty years later.  

Over the next decade, Rand worked at odd jobs, mastered English, and churned out screenplays, short stories, and a novel. Her perseverance and talent eventually paid off with the sale of her first screenplay, "Red Pawn," to Universal Pictures in 1932 and her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1934 and rejected by numerous publishers, until The Macmillan Company in the United States and Cassells and Company in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels, it is based on her years under Communism.  

She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented the ideal man, man as "he could be and ought to be.” This novel first presented Rand’s morality of rational egoism and the power of individualism. Roark demands the right to design and build loyal only to his own ideals and principles. In his long struggle to succeed, he eventually triumphs over every form of spiritual collectivism.  

Twelve publishers rejected The Fountainhead before it was finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company and published in 1943. It made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth two years later. It was made into a film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in 1948.  

In her next novel, Atlas Shrugged, Rand dramatized the major elements of her challenging new philosophy of “reason, individualism, and capitalism,” which she called “Objectivism.” She realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles that make such individuals possible. The story integrates ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sex.  

After Atlas Shrugged was published, Ayn wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism, which she characterized as "a philosophy for living on earth.” She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976 on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.

Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print with hundreds of thousands of copies sold each year and total sales of more than twenty million.

Wishing you the rewards of making a difference in all pursuits of contribution.  

Sincerely,