Ayn Rand
About Ayn Rand
Who is Ayn Rand?
Early Life
Education
When her family returned to Crimea she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history and proceeded to graduate in 1924. After the communist takeover, life became grey and the only light in her life was western theatre and movies. After she discovered those pleasures she decided to attend the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting.
In the United States and Ayn's Career
Later she struggled for several years until she managed to publish her own screenplay called 'Red Pawn' to Universal Pictures in 1932 and published her first play on Broadway in 1935. She completed her first novel in 1934 called 'Night of January 16th' and was published by the MacMillan company in 1936 after numerous rejections. The novel itself was based on the tyranny she faced at the hands of the Soviet Union.
She later wrote a book called 'The Fountainhead' which featured her ideal hero, in this book he was called Howard Roark. It was published by the Bobbs-Merril company after many rejections and made history by becoming a best-seller a week after being publish and sold. In 1946 she started writing her personal masterpiece, 'Atlas Shrugged', while attempting to publish the screenplay for 'The Fountainhead'. She completed and published 'Atlas Shrugged' in 1957, it is widely known as her greatest work and is one of her few fiction novels.
Later in life she began writing about her own personal philosophy Objectivism, which she called a philosophy for those living on Earth. She wrote and published several periodicals on this philosophy from 1962 to 1976. Her essays and periodicals provided most of the material used in her six books on Objectivism.