Thinker

Ayn Rand

Her novel imagined what would happen if the most productive people on earth stopped working.

Novelist and philosopher, 1905–1982

Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. When she was twelve, the Bolshevik Revolution seized her father's pharmacy.1 She studied at Petrograd State University, obtained a visa to visit relatives in Chicago in 1926, and never returned to the Soviet Union.

Working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, she adopted the name Ayn Rand. Her 1943 novel The Fountainhead told the story of an architect who dynamites a housing project rather than allow his design to be altered. The book sold slowly at first, then steadily for decades.2

In 1957, Rand published Atlas Shrugged, a 1,168-page novel in which the world's most productive industrialists, scientists, and artists withdraw their labor from a society that punishes achievement.3 The book debuted at number thirteen on the New York Times bestseller list and peaked at number three. It contained a sixty-page speech by the protagonist, John Galt, that laid out the core of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.

That philosophy held that rational self-interest was the highest moral purpose, that productive work was a primary virtue, and that laissez-faire capitalism was the only system consistent with individual rights.4

37,000,000

Copies of Rand’s books sold as of 2020, with Atlas Shrugged still averaging hundreds of thousands of copies per year.

Atlas Shrugged was Rand's last novel. She spent the rest of her career writing nonfiction essays on philosophy and politics. Alan Greenspan, later chairman of the Federal Reserve, was among her early inner circle.5 Academic philosophers largely ignored her work, though her readership continued to grow.

A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club asked readers to name the book that had most influenced their lives. Atlas Shrugged placed second, behind only the Bible.6 In 1995, the Times Literary Supplement did not include it among the hundred most influential books since World War II. The gap between popular reception and institutional recognition has defined Rand's legacy since the 1950s.

Timeline

1926

Rosenbaum arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union and adopted the name Ayn Rand.

1943

The Fountainhead was published, telling the story of an architect who refuses to compromise his vision.

1957

Atlas Shrugged appeared, presenting Objectivism through a novel about the world’s producers going on strike.

1982

Rand died in New York on March 6, leaving a philosophical movement with millions of adherents and few academic allies.

Endnotes

1 Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009), 10–15.

2 Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, 130–155.

3 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 170–175.

4 Stephen Hicks, "Rand, Ayn," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

5 Burns, Goddess of the Market, 180.

6 Library of Congress and Book of the Month Club, "Survey of Lifetime Reading Habits," 1991.