Ayn Rand

In 1927, Ayn Rand met Frank O'Connor, an aspiring actor, on the set of ‘The King of Kings’. They got married on April 15, 1929 and remained together till his death in 1979. The couple did not have any children.

Rand was a heavy smoker, as a result of which, she had lung cancer in the early 1970s. In 1974, she underwent an operation. Yet, she remained an active lecturer till 1981.

She died of heart failure on March 6, 1982, at her home in New York City. However, her legacy still lives on. The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), a nonprofit think-tank in Irvine, California, continues to promote her philosophy till this day.

Ayn Rand was born as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905 in Saint Petersburg. Her father, Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, was the owner of a pharmacy. Her mother’s name was Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). She was eldest of her parents’ three daughters.

Alisa had her initial schooling at the prestigious Stoiunina Gymnasium and started writing from the age of eight. Although her parents tried to shield the girls from the political upheaval that was taking shape at that time, Alisa slowly developed her own views and favored republican type of government over constitutional monarchy.

Therefore, when the February Revolution erupted in Saint Petersburg in 1917, 12-year-old Alisa favored Alexander Kerensky over Tsar Nicholas II. However, as the October Revolution started later in the year, their family life was totally disrupted.

As the Bolsheviks seized power, her father’s business was confiscated and they had to flee to the Crimea, where they tried to start afresh. However, four years later, as Alisa graduated from high school at the age of 16, the family returned to Saint Petersburg, then renamed as Petrograd.

By now higher education had been opened to women. In 1921, she seized this opportunity to enter the department of social pedagogy of Petrograd State University with history as her major. She also took up philosophy and literature as secondary subjects.

In the middle of 1926, Ayn Rand left for Hollywood, where she took up odd jobs to maintain herself. Then one day, as she was standing at the door of a studio, she spotted Cecil B. DeMille, one of Hollywood's leading directors, and kept on staring at him.

Cecil also noticed her and asked her why she had been staring at him. She told him that she was from Soviet Russia and had come here with the hope of becoming a screenwriter. Impressed, he appointed her as an extra in his on-going project, ‘The King of Kings’.

Rand became a permanent US resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. Meanwhile she began working first as a script reader and then a junior scriptwriter for DeMille. Success still eluded her and she kept on doing odd jobs to sustain her writing.

Sometime now, she started writing her debut novel, ‘We the Living’. In 1931, while working as the head of the costume department at the RKM Studio, she decided to take a break to write a screenplay.

Titled ‘Red Pawn’, it was the first screenplay that she was able to sell. Although it was purchased by Universal Pictures in 1932, it was never made into film. Sometime after that, she quit RKM Studio in order to finish her novel ‘We the Living’.

Many critics consider Rand’s 1957 novel, ‘Atlas Shrugged’, to be her most important work. It is her longest novel and comprises romance, mystery and even an element of science fiction. On top of that, it also provides a glimpse into Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.