About Ayn Rand!
About Ayn Rand
Short timeline
1869: Father, Zinovy Zacharovich Rosenbaum, born in Breslitovsk, Russia (November 18)
1880: Mother, Anna Borisovna Kaplan, born in St. Petersburg (October 15)
1904: Parents married (May 3)
1905: Born in St. Petersburg (February 2; i.e., January 20 on the Julian calendar)
1912: Family moves to an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt at Znamenskaya Square
1946: First U.S. edition of Anthem published (circa July)
1976: Publishes last article in The Ayn Rand Letter (January—February) Attends White House dinner honoring Malcolm Fraser (July 27)
1982: Writes her last page of “Atlas Shrugged” teleplay (January 1) Dies in New York City (March 6)
Early Life
Ayn Rand First Interview 1959 (Full)
High school
major life events
her personal philosophy
"WISHING WON'T MAKE IT SO"
Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, begins by embracing the basic fact that existence exists. Reality is, and in the quest to live we must discover reality’s nature and learn to act successfully in it.
To exist is to be something, to possess a specific identity. This is the Law of Identity: A is A. Facts are facts, independent of any consciousness. No amount of passionate wishing, desperate longing or hopeful pleading can alter the facts. Nor will ignoring or evading the facts erase them: the facts remain, immutable.
In Rand’s philosophy, reality is not to be rewritten or escaped, but, solemnly and proudly, faced. One of her favorite sayings is Francis Bacon’s: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
Reality — that which exists — has no alternatives, no competitors, nothing “transcending” it. To embrace existence is to reject all notions of the supernatural and the mystical, including God.
Book's
Non-fiction Books Published in Rand's Lifetime
- For the New Intellectual (1961)
- The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
- Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
- The Romantic Manifesto (1969)
- The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971)
- Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979)
- Non-fiction Books Published Posthumously
- Philosophy: Who Needs It, edited by Leonard Peikoff (1982)
- The Voice of Reason, edited by Leonard Peikoff (1989)
- The Ayn Rand Column, edited by Peter Schwartz (1991)
- Letters of Ayn Rand, edited by Michael S. Berliner (1995)
- Ayn Rand's Marginalia, edited by Robert Mayhew (1995)
- Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman (1997)
- The Ayn Rand Reader, edited by Gary Hull and Leonard Peikoff (1999)
- Return of the Primitive, edited by Peter Schwartz (1999)
- Russian Writings on Hollywood, edited by Michael S. Berliner, translated by Dina Garmong (1999)
- The Art of Fiction, edited by Tore Boeckmann (2000)
- The Art of Nonfiction, edited by Robert Mayhew (2001)
- The Ayn Rand Sampler (2002)
- Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew (2005)