Cameron Crawford: Ayn Rand Part I

Objectivism is,"... the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

This quote is taken directly from the appendix of a best selling book, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg Russia as Alissa Rosenbaum. She was an intelligent child having taught herself how to read by the age of six and decided to become a fictional writer at the age of nine. She had strong opinions regarding communism and had opposed the Bolshevik Revolution which led to the take over of Russia by what would become the Russian Communist Party. When she first learned of the United States of America she quickly fell in love and made that her model for what a nation of free men could be. After graduation of high school she enrolled in the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history.

After graduating from Petrograd in 1924, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts to pursue her love for screenwriting. At the end of 1925 she obtained a visa from Soviet Russia and in February of 1926 she arrived in New York City. She told the Russian officials that her stay was going to be short, but she was determined to not go back to Russia. She recieved an extension to her visa six months later and then headed to Hollywood.

By pure coincidence Ayn Rand met Cecil B. DeMille who invited her to the set of his movie, King of Kings, where she got a job as a script reader. A week later she met her future husband for fifty years, Frank O'Connor.  For several years, Ayn Rand did not experience success in the writing business until her play  Night of January 16th was produced on stage in Hollywood and then in Broadway in 1932. Then, in 1936, her first book We the Living was published. In 1938, while she was writing Fountainhead, she wrote the novella Anthem. Anthem is about two protagonists escaping from a collectivist society and discovering their own individual self, or ego.

Ayn Rand continued to write and finished the novel Fountainhead in 1943. Fountainhead grew in popularity by word-of-mouth and ended up on The New York Times bestseller list two years later. In 1948 she produced a screenplay for the novel. In 1946, she started her greatest work, Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged  was published in 1951 and became her greatest work of fiction. She integrated her views on epistemology, metaphysics, politics, ethics, economics, and sex all into one novel. She later called her views on philosophy Objectivism.  Till her death, Ayn Rand wrote many editorials and lectured on her philosophy.