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During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the
Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the
Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In
order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea,
where she finished high school. The final Communist victory
brought the confiscation of her father's pharmacy and periods
of 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.
When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the
University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history.
Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free
inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs.
Amidst the increasingly gray life, her greatest pleasures were
Viennese operettas and Western films and plays. Long an
admirer of cinema, she entered the State Institute for Cinema
Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting. It was at this time that
she was first published: a booklet on actress Pola Negri
(1925) and a booklet titled “Hollywood: American Movie City”
(1926), both reprinted in 1999 in Russian Writings on
Hollywood.
In late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia
for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she
told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was
determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York
City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her
relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and
then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.
On Ayn Rand’s 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 the next
week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O’Connor, whom she
married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years
later.
After struggling for several years at various nonwriting jobs,
including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO Radio
Pictures, Inc., she sold her first screenplay, “Red Pawn,” to
Universal Pictures in 1932 and saw 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 but was
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 was based on her years under Soviet tyranny.
She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935 (taking a short
break in 1937 to write the anti-collectivist novelette
Anthem). In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she
presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction
was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as “he
could be and ought to be.” The Fountainhead was rejected by
twelve publishers but finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill
Company. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a
best-seller through word of mouth two years later, and gained
for its author lasting recognition as a champion of
individualism.
Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the
screenplay for The Fountainhead, but wartime restrictions
delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a
screenwriter for Hal Wallis Productions, she began her major
novel Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New
York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of
Atlas Shrugged.
Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement
and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her
unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that
integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics,
economics and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a
fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic
fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic
principles which make such individuals possible.
Thereafter, Ayn Rand 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, her essays providing much
of the material for six books 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, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year,
so far totaling more than 25 million. Several new volumes have
been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her
philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of
thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with
a growing impact on American culture.
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