Ayn Rand
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Date: 2018-12-21

Ayn Rand, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=339 / CC BY SA 3.0

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (; born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum;  – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged", and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, "The Fountainhead". In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel "Atlas Shrugged". Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting "laissez-faire" capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals.

Literary critics received Rand's fiction with mixed reviews and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings. She has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives.

Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum () on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum and his wife, Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). Her father was upwardly mobile and a pharmacist and her mother was socially ambitious and religiously observant. Rand later said she found school unchallenging and began writing screenplays at the age of eight and novels at the age of ten. At the prestigious Stoiunina Gymnasium, her closest friend was Vladimir Nabokov's younger sister, Olga. The two girls shared an intense interest in politics and would engage in debates at the Nabokov mansion: while Olga defended constitutional monarchy, Alisa supported republican ideals.

She was twelve at the time of the February Revolution of 1917, during which she favored Alexander Kerensky over Tsar Nicholas II. The subsequent October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had previously enjoyed. Her father's business was confiscated, and the family fled to the Crimean Peninsula, which was initially under control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. While in high school, she realized that she was an atheist and valued reason above any other human virtue. After graduating from high school in the Crimea in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was renamed at that time), where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving.
After the Russian Revolution, universities were opened to women, allowing her to be in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University. At the age...