  Profiles article index >> Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905. At age six, she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction-writing her career. Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired. During her high-school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and — in 1917 — the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter. On Ayn Rand's second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie, The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later. After struggling for several years at various non-writing jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at RKO, she sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1933 but was rejected by publishers for years, until Macmillan in the U.S. and Cassell in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels — it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny — We the Living was not well received by American intellectuals and reviewers. Ayn Rand was up against the pro-communism dominating the culture during "the Red Decade." She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as "he could be and ought to be." The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism. Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but war-time restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis, she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951, she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged. Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel, she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sex. Although she considered herself
|
