Rand, Ayn (redirected from Alice Rosenbaum)

Rand, Ayn (īn), 1905–82, American writer, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. She came to the United States in 1926 and worked for many years as a screenwriter. Her novels are romantic and dramatic, and they espouse a philosophy of rational self-interest that opposes the collective of the modern welfare state. Her best-known novels include The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In For the New Intellectual (1961) she summarized her philosophy, which she called "objectivism."

Bibliography

See the memoir by N. Branden (1989); biography by B. Branden (1987); study by J. T. Baker (1987); her letters, ed. by M. S. Berliner (1995), and her journals, ed. by D. Harriman (1997).

---

Rand, Ayn

 orig. Alice Rosenbaum or Alissa Rosenbaum

(born Feb. 2, 1905, St. Petersburg, Russia—died March 6, 1982, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Russian-born U.S. writer. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1926 after graduating from the University of Petrograd and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. She won a cult following with two best-selling novels presenting her belief that all real achievement comes from individual ability and effort, that laissez-faire capitalism is most congenial to the exercise of talent, and that selfishness is a virtue, altruism a vice. In The Fountainhead (1943), a superior individual transcends traditionalism and conformism. The allegorical Atlas Shrugged (1957) combines science fiction with her political message. She expounded her philosophy, which she called objectivism, in nonfiction works and as editor of two journals and became an icon of radical libertarianism.

---

Rand, Ayn (1905–82) writer, philosopher; born in St. Petersburg, Russia. As an adolescent during the Bolshevik Revolution, she saw people stripped of property and massacred. After graduating from the University of Leningrad (1926), she fled to the U.S.A., which she considered the "country of the individual," becoming a citizen in 1931. Starting as a screenwriter and dramatist, she eventually won fame for her novels, such as The Fountainhead (1943)—also made into a film she scripted—and Atlas Shrugged (1957), the bible of her "objectivism." This philosophy, promoted in books such as The Virtue of Selfishness (1957) and through an institute set up by her disciple Nathaniel Brandon, glorified self-assertion and competition.