Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Biography and Creativity

Ayn Rand, a writer who accomplished the rare task of working out a formal system of philosophy through fiction writing, was born Alissa (Russian for Alice) Zinovieva Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in the Russian city of St. Petersburg to secular Jewish parents, Zinovy “Fronz” Zakharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum. As such, she was profoundly affected by two Russian revolutions, the first in February 1917, which she supported, and the second, in October of the same year, which she opposed. She was a young partisan of the first, led by Alexander Kerensky. She has called this Russian epoch the only time she “was synchronized with history.”

The second, the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which she opposed, resulted in her father’s business’s being nationalized. At the age of 12, Rand lost the pleasant and affluent life of foreign travel and resort vacations to which she had grown accustomed. As the revolutions transformed St. Petersburg into Petrograd, then into Leningrad, life had become a struggle with scarcity and long lines waiting for bare necessities. In 1918, her family fled these privations to live in Crimea until 1921.

Despite all this, Rand did attend Leningrad State University, studying math, history, philosophy, and engineering; she graduated in 1924. Having known since childhood that her greatest ambition was to become a writer, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting in 1924. Soon, however, she despaired of finding the intellectual freedom she needed to fulfill her goal in Soviet Russia; for this reason, she obtained a passport in 1925 and traveled to the United States in 1926, apparently intending never to return.

As people sometimes do when starting a new life, Alissa Rosenbaum changed her name. For her first name, she adopted Ayn, (rhymes with mine,), and for her new last name, she chose Rand, according to some sources, because it was the name of the typewriter she was using. After staying with an aunt in Chicago for six months, she tried to “make it” as a Hollywood scriptwriter. While working toward this goal, she supported herself with many less glamorous jobs, including waitressing, envelope stuffing, and wardrobe clerking. Standing in line one day, she caught the eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille, who hired her as a movie extra.

More important than those few walk-ons, however, was her meeting another movie extra, Francis (Frank) O’Connor, whom she married on April 15, 1929. Giving up acting, O’Connor tried his hand at a number of professions, including flower arranging and painting, but he would forever be most famous as the husband of Ayn Rand. Besides the support and inspiration that Rand credited to O’Connor, their marriage enabled her to become a naturalized American citizen on March 13, 1931.

Finally in a good position to concentrate on her writing, Rand was able to focus on her first novel, We the Living, begun in 1930 and finished in 1933, although it was not published until 1936. Its protagonist, Kira Argounova, a young woman who wishes to become an engineer, struggles against the Soviet ideal of citizens’ renouncing all “selfish” ambitions to live for the state. This heroine, the most autobiographical of all Rand’s characters, struggled, as did the young Alissa Rosenbaum, with the added burden of upper-class parents. While Alissa managed to leave, however, Kira’s fate was far less kind and she is left to fight, along with Leo (Lev) Kovalensky, a former aristocrat himself, and Andrei Taganov, an idealistic young Communist Party member, to fight for self-expression and happiness against a system of grinding oppression. This struggle against collectivism set the tone for all Rand’s future works.

In the meantime, after writing several movie scenarios and scripts (one of which became a movie), Rand dramatized this struggle between the one and the many and enjoyed her first public success as a writer when her play Woman on Trial (original title Penthouse Legend) premiered in Los Angeles in 1934. Shortly thereafter, Rand and her husband moved to New York City for the 1935 Broadway premiere of the same play, renamed The Night of January 16th. Built around the trial of a woman, Karen Andre, accused of killing her lover, the entrepreneur Bjorn Faulkner, the play introduced the unique device of drawing jury members from the audience. Despite a constant battle between Rand and her producer, the value-driven arguments remained an intrinsic part of the play for its successful six-month run; this rhetorical strategy also set the tone for Rand’s future writings.

In 1935, having already begun writing the novel that was to become her greatest publishing success, The Fountainhead, Rand paused to complete her novella Anthem in 1937. Published in England the following year, it did not find a U.S. publisher until 1946. This novella is unlike anything Rand wrote before or after in the simple, yet poetic language of its first-person narration, as well as the accessible, parablelike quality of the story. It is also unique in that its brevity and its expired copyright have made it one of the most widely available works of fiction on the Internet.

Again, this story pits the individual against the collective. However, this tale’s narrator lives in some future society where individuality is so suppressed that he has no name and no conception of the word I. Labeled Equality 7-2521 for convenience sake, the narrator begins his account, “It is a sin to write this.” The sin is not just in the writing itself, since the Council of Vocations has deemed him fit only to clean the streets, but also in the fact that Equality 7-2521 is writing for no one but himself. In fact, the very condition of being alone is a sin. Contrary to an older tradition of creating future utopias of collective societies, this work creates the opposite, called a dystopia, which shows the worst possible result of what Rand saw as society’s slide into a more and more collectivist mindset.

The result is a medieval stagnation symbolized by reliance on candles for light and refusal to allow progress not generated by collective “research.” When Equality 7-2521 reinvents an electrical form of light, the Council of Science shrinks back in terror and condemns him and his invention to destruction. This is the clearest introduction to Rand’s opposition of collective stagnation and championing of individualistic progress.

As stated previously, her next novel, The Fountainhead, established Rand’s reputation as a fiction writer and an advocate of individualism. By the fourth decade after its initial publication in 1943, it had already sold 4 million copies. Shortly after its initial publication, Hollywood paid Rand $50,000 for the rights, then hired her to write a screenplay for the movie that eventually starred Gary Cooper as the novel’s architect protagonist, Howard Roark, and Patricia Neal as his self-destructive love interest, Dominique Francon. Rand and O’Connor returned to Hollywood so that she could work on this and other screenplays.

While her later work, Atlas Shrugged, demonstrated a more refined political and philosophically complete analysis of the struggle for selfdetermination, The Fountainhead is widely perceived as more psychologically compelling. As she did in The Night of January 16th, Rand used courtroom drama and the persuasive speeches embedded in such drama in The Fountainhead to argue the rights of individuals against collective pressure. Howard Roark, the novel’s protagonist, is tried for dynamiting Cortlandt Homes, a low-cost-housing project that he designed for Peter Keating, another architect and also his foil. Roark does so knowing that the widespread rejection of his modernist designs will make it impossible for his project to be built otherwise. He lets Keating, who is far inferior as an architect, take credit for the design on the one condition that it be built exactly as Roark designed it. Roark argues so persuasively for the rights of the individual over the products of his own mind that the jury acquits him.

This fiction writing as advocacy, which some critics have called “polemics,” is expanded greatly in the television speech of John Galt, the idealized inventor/protagonist of Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged. In fact, Rand’s philosophy of objectivism seemed to grow at the expense of her fiction. As she refined and elaborated her thinking on how we know things, character and plot “take a back seat” to philosophical debate and explanation. For instance, Kira Argounova’s arguments with her Communist friend in We the Living expand into the courtroom rhetoric of The Fountainhead and then mushroom into Galt’s three- hour TV speech in Atlas Shrugged, interrupting the action of the novel for almost 60 pages. It is perhaps to be expected, therefore, that Atlas Shrugged would be Rand’s last work of fiction as she dedicated herself entirely to explicating her epistemology in her articles for the Objectivist Newsletter, renamed the Objectiv- ist, and, later still, the Ayn Rand Letter.

Before this long speech, however, the novel has established that all the world’s true innovators (Atlases) have shrugged off the world’s burdens and gone on strike. Two of the last hold-outs against this strike, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, have struggled to keep things from spinning apart, all the while trying to solve the mystery of where all the rest of the world’s innovators are disappearing to and why. Rearden, who invents a metal stronger and lighter than steel, and Dagny Taggart, who heroically keeps her family’s railroad running while her brother, James, takes the credit, are eventually won over and end up with Galt in their capitalist utopia, Mulligan’s Valley, or Galt’s Gulch, as it is also called. As some critics have pointed out, this shift from the more character-driven story of The Fountainhead to the more idea-driven writing of Atlas Shrugged is signaled by the naming of their respective parts; sections of The Fountainhead are named for characters, whereas sections of Atlas Shrugged are labeled according to Aristotle’s principles of logic such as “Non-Contradiction” and “A is A.”

Thereafter, while Rand taught fiction-writing classes in 1958, her own writing focused on a more straightforward exposition of her evolving political, economic, and philosophical defense of selfishness and capitalism. Rand also spoke at such venues as Queens College, Yale University, and the Ford Hall Forum on issues such as the destructive force of faith and the “Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age” and received an honorary doctorate from Lewis and Clark University in 1963. Along with Nathaniel Branden, who focused on the psychological aspects of the philosophy that had become known as objectivism, Rand continued to explain her views in articles for the Objectivist Newsletter, started in 1962 and later called the Objectivist (1966). She also helped Branden establish his own Nathaniel Branden Institute, offering both live and recorded lectures on objectivism and psychology. Rand even appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1967.

In 1969, Rand published The Romantic Manifesto, which bemoaned the death of romanticism in all but a few “bright spots in a stagnant gray fog.” By this time, objectivism was developing schisms. In the first issue of her new Ayn Rand Letter, which she began publishing in 1974, she excoriated Bran- den and explained their falling out in philosophical, rather than personal, terms. However, it seems clear in retrospect that a broken affair played a large part in the dispute that was to destroy objectivism’s unity as a movement and spell the death of the institute. See Barbara Branden’s book The Passion of Ayn R. and (1986) or the film (1999) of the same name for more details on the personal and tumultuous events leading to the splintering of objectivism.

While she continued to deliver speeches at West Point (1974) and Ford Hall Forum (1977), to write, and to glean such honors as inclusion at a White House dinner for Alan Greenspan’s swearing in (1974) and another honoring Malcolm Fraser (1976), as well as a Ford Hall Forum luncheon in her own honor, all was not well. Besides her intellectual and professional disputes with former followers, Rand’s health had begun to fail. After losing part of a lung to cancer, Rand suffered an even greater loss in the death of her husband and lifelong love in November 1979. By 1980, she had broken with most of her “inner circle”; she died in New York, in her 34th Street apartment, on March 6, 1982.

While her intellectual legacy is still quite controversial, this much is clear: Her system of philosophy and epistemology called objectivism remains a force to be reckoned with. More than 25 years after her death, Rand is a palpable Internet presence with several sites dedicated to keeping her ideas alive. Her books still sell very well, continuing to attract new followers, especially among the young. While some critics have accused her of creating an elitist philosophy reminiscent of that of Frederick Nietzsche, she herself pointed out that Nietzsche’s “rebellion against altruism consisted of replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of others to oneself,” abandoning reason and principle.

In fact, one may see in The Fountainhead's characters Howard Roark and his foil, architectural critic Ellsworth Toohey, exemplars of “healthy” and “unhealthy elitism.” As Roark argues at his trial, selfishness and egoism are the ultimate virtues, since it is only through them that an individual can pursue his or her goals and, thus, contribute to society’s progress. Unlike other defenders of capitalism, Rand did not defend the selfishness of the marketplace as a private vice yielding public good, but as a virtue in and of itself.