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Ayn Rand 1 Early life and career. Her father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was a prosperous pharmacist. ... 2 The Fountainhead. Rand’s first successful play, Night of January 16th (1933; originally titled Penthouse Legend ), was a paean to individualism in the form of a courtroom drama. 3 Atlas Shrugged. ...
Ayn Rand arrived in Chicago in 1926 and then moved to Hollywood, where she met American filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Her chance encounter with DeMille led to work as a movie extra and eventually to a job as a screenwriter. Rand sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios in 1932.
In The Literary Encyclopedia entry for Rand written in 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation."
In 1985, Rand's intellectual heir Leonard Peikoff established the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Rand's ideas and works. In 1990, after an ideological disagreement with Peikoff, philosopher David Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies, now known as The Atlas Society.
January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982), known by her pen name Ayn Rand ( / aɪn / ), was an American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926.
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism.
Atlas Shrugged and Objectivism. Rand's novella Anthem was reprinted in the June 1953 issue of the pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Following the publication of The Fountainhead, Rand received numerous letters from readers, some of whom the book profoundly influenced.
Two movies have been made about Rand's life. A 1997 documentary film, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Passion of Ayn Rand, a 1999 television adaptation of the book of the same name, won several awards.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, was considered Rand's magnum opus. Rand described the theme of the novel as "the role of the mind in man's existence —and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest".
Yet, throughout literary academia, Ayn Rand is considered a philosopher.". Writing in the 1998 edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, political theorist Chandran Kukathas summarized the mainstream philosophical reception of her work in two parts.
Rand's first published novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living , was published in 1936. Set in Soviet Russia, it focused on the struggle between the individual and the state.