So you think you know Ayn Rand

Secular Human, our writer with a philosophy background, read both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged while working on an advanced degree.  He was not greatly impressed with either book.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum; who died in 1982, was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter.

She is known for her two best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926.

She first achieved fame in 1943 with her novel The Fountainhead, which in 1957 was followed by her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged.

Rand's political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individual rights (including property rights) and laissez-faire capitalism, enforced by a constitutionally limited government.

She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism, including fascism, communism, socialism, and the welfare state.

Rand was twelve at the time of the Russian revolution of 1917. Opposed to the Tsar, Rand's sympathies were with Alexander Kerensky. Rand's family life was disrupted by the rise of the Bolshevik party under Vladimir Lenin.

Her father's pharmacy was confiscated by the Bolsheviks, and the family fled to the Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War.

She later recalled that while in high school she determined that she was an atheist and that she valued reason and intellect. After graduating from high school in the Crimea she briefly held a job teaching Red Army soldiers to read.


After emigrating to the US, During the 1940s, Rand became involved in political activism. Both she and her husband worked full time in volunteer positions for the 1940 Presidential campaign of Republican Wendell Willkie.

This activity also brought her into contact with other intellectuals sympathetic to free-market capitalism. She became friends with journalist Henry Hazlitt and his wife, and Hazlitt introduced her to the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises.

Rand's first major success as a writer came with The Fountainhead in 1943, a romantic and philosophical novel that she wrote over a period of seven years.

The novel centers on an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark, and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers"—those who attempt to live through others, placing others above self.

While completing the novel, Rand began taking the prescription amphetamine Benzedrine to fight fatigue. Her use of the drug enabled her to work long hours to meet her deadline for delivering the finished novel to Bobbs-Merrill, but when the book was done she was so exhausted that her doctor ordered two weeks rest. Rand also rejected the libertarian philosophy.

Her continued use of it for several decades also may have contributed to volatile mood swings observed by her associates in later years.

In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers around her. This group (jokingly designated "The Collective") included future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Barbara's cousin Leonard Peikoff.

At first the group was an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy. Later she began allowing them to read the drafts of her new novel, Atlas Shrugged, as the manuscript pages were written.

In 1954 Rand's close relationship with the much younger Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the consent of their spouses.

She also began delivering annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, responding afterwards in her famously spirited form to questions from the audience.

During these speeches and Q&A sessions, she often took controversial stances on political and social issues of the day.

These included supporting abortion rights, opposing the Vietnam War and the military draft (but condemning draft dodgers as "bums"), supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 as "civilized men fighting savages", saying European colonists had the right to take land from American Indians, and calling homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting".

She also endorsed several Republican candidates for President of the United States, most strongly Barry Goldwater in 1964,


Rand developed an integrated philosophical system called "Objectivism." Its essence is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

She rejected the libertarian movement,  although Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, considers Rand one of the three most important women (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) of modern American libertarianism.

<sup>Rand is more complex than the right wing would suggest. She was born in Russia and lived through the Russian Revolution. She was an athiest and tutored Red Army soldiers. 

She was 'pro-choice.' She also abused amphetamines. She also rejected the libertarian philosophy and committed adultery. 

Few Republicans today would describe her as a 'family values' icon. 


source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand</sup>

 

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