Ayn Rand

Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, she lived through the Russian Revolution before emigrating to the United States in 1926. She settled in America, worked in Hollywood for a time, and eventually became a novelist, screenwriter, and public intellectual.

Her breakthrough came with The Fountainhead in 1943, followed by Atlas Shrugged in 1957, two novels that made her famous for mixing drama, ambition, and philosophical argument. Across her fiction and nonfiction, she argued for reason, individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism, building the system of ideas she named Objectivism.

Rand remains one of the most widely discussed and polarizing writers of the twentieth century. Admirers see her as a powerful defender of independence and achievement, while critics challenge both her philosophy and her politics, but her influence on readers and on American debates about freedom and self-interest has endured.