Life
Ayn Rand as a young child
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Ayn Rand was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia as Alisa Rosenbaum. Her father was a pharmacist; Rand, her parents and two sisters lived above the family pharmacy. Rand did not get along well with her mother, and the two had quite a tumultuous relationship. Rand looked up to her father and the hero in The Mysterious Valley, a fictitious novel she first read at age 9. It was reported that the character Howard Roark from her novel The Fountainhead was based on this hero. She first learned to read at 6 years old, when she taught herself. She lived through and witnessed the Russian Revolutions of the time, which greatly influenced her life and writing. In order to escape the revolution and civil war, Rand and her family moved to Ukraine, and later Cremia. She graduated from high school in Crimea in 1921, and her family went back to St. Petersburg, at the time called Petrograd. She attended Petrograd State University and later graduated from Leningrad State University. She left the USSR in 1926, to France and then America. She lived in Chicago for a 6 months, then moved to Hollywood, where she would meet her future husband Frank O'Connor later that year. She was a movie extra that year, followed in 1927 as a junior screen writer, and in 1929 in the wardrobe department when she married Frank. (Ayn Rand Institute)
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Rand became a United States citizen on March 13, 1931. From 1932 to 1934, she wrote Ideal, Woman on Trial, and moved to New York City. She started The Fountainhead in 1935, following the opening of the play Night of January 16th. We the Living was published in 1936, and Anthem in 1938. Her family died during World War II; the only surviving members were Rand and Eleanora, her sister. The Fountainhead was published in 1943, and the film version opened in 1949. Atlas Shrugged was released in 1957, after which she began teaching a writing class and talking at universities such as Queens College and Yale University. She began writing a column for the Los Angeles Times in 1962, following the publishing of the Objectivist Newsletter and the opening of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI). He was a key figure in her life; Rand had an affair with Branden, with consent from her husband Frank and Nathaniel's wife Barbara, from 1954 to 1959. Rand wanted to reconnect in 1964, but Nathaniel was having an affair with another woman. In 1968, Rand had a very public splitting from the Brandens and NBI was closed. In 1974 she presented a discussion entitled "Philosophy: Who Needs It" and in 1976 published the last edition of The Ayn Rand Letter. Frank died in 1979, her last lecture was in 1981, and she died in 1982, two months after she wrote the last page of the Atlas Shrugged screenplay. (Ayn Rand Institute) |
Ayn Rand and Frank O'Connor
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