Ayn Rand's Birthday

Today, February 2nd, is the birthday of Russian-born author Ayn Rand. She was born in St. Petersburg in 1905 as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in a non-observant Jewish family. Her family fled to Crimea after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but she returned to Petersburg for University a few years later. In 1925 she traveled to America for a “visit”, but stayed in Chicago for 6 months before moving to Hollywood. She married an actor and became an American citizen in 1931.

Though Rand spent most of her life as an American, eventually settling in New York, she never stopped looking back and critiquing her native Russia (or, for most of her life, the Soviet Union). Some of her early work, such as We the Living and Red Pawn, were set in Russia. Other works, such as her famous Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, were set in New York but thematically influenced by her experiences of a harsh life in Russia.

Ayn Rand was a very ideological writer, often putting conceptual aspects of her work above characterization. For this reason, her greatness as a writer is often contested; is she great because she saw so deeply into social conflict? Or is she a poor writer, because her books lack full characters?

Rand began the philosophical system, Objectivism. In her theory, the only absolute in a man’s life is his happiness. Values external to ourselves are not intrinsic to the world, but exists in our minds because they have been entrenched there by history. Ayn Rand died in 1982, but there are still followers of her theory today.

Happy birthday, Ayn.