Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg. Her
father took the family away to the Crimea as the Bolshevik Revolution
erupted; when they returned the family business had been taken over by
the state. Alissa graduated from the University of Petrograd (Leningrad)
in 1924, before beginning a screenwriting course. The following year
she traveled to Chicago to visit a cousin, never returning. After six
months she moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, changing
her name to Ayn Rand. Ayn was the first name of a Finnish writer,
Rand the model of her Remington typewriter. On her second day in
Los Angeles she famously met Cecil B. de Mille, who offered her work
as an extra on a film where her future husband, Frank O'Connor, was
on the set.
Rand never broke in to screenwriting, but in 1935 her play Woman
on Trial was mounted on Broadway as Night of January 16th. Her first
novels We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938) were well received
critically but did not become bestsellers. Rand's fortunes changed with
the success of The Fountainhead (1943), a 700-page story of a modernist
architect who battles to realize his vision. Then Atlas Shrugged
was an instant bestseller.
In 1958 Rand and Nathaniel Branden opened an institute in New
York to spread objectivist philosophy. Rand's non-fiction output in
these years included newsletters, the objectivist journal For the New
Intellectual (1961), and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966).
Having railed against government anti-smoking campaigns, the
author died in 1982 of lung cancer. A dollar sign was placed over her
coffin.