Ayn Rand Ayn Rand Novelist and philosopher best known for her philosophy of Objectivism
Ayn Rand February March first name pronounced IPA a n rhymes with 'mine' born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was best known for her philosophy of Objectivism and her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize above all her concepts of individualism rational egoism rational self interest and capitalism Believing government has a legitimate but relatively minimal role in a free society she was not an anarchist but a minarchist though she did not use the term minarchist Her novels were based upon the archetype of the Randian hero a man whose ability and independence causes conflict with the masses but who perseveres nevertheless to achieve his values Rand viewed this hero as the ideal and made it the express goal of her literature to showcase such heroes She believed. That man must choose his values and actions by reason. That the individual has a right to exist for his own sake neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self and. That no one has the right to seek values from others by physical force or impose ideas on others by physical force.
 Biography.
 Early life.
Rand was born in Saint Petersburg Russia and was the eldest of three daughters of a Jewish family Her parents were agnostic and largely non observant From an early age she displayed a strong interest in literature and films She started writing screenplays and novels from the age of seven Her mother undertook to teach her French and subscribed to a magazine featuring stories for boys where Rand found her first childhood hero Cyrus Paltons an Indian army officer in a Rudyard Kipling style story called The Mysterious Valley Throughout her youth she read the novels of Sir Walter Scott Alexandre Dumas and other Romantic writers and expressed a passionate enthusiasm toward the Romantic movement as a whole She discovered Victor Hugo at the age of thirteen and fell deeply in love with his novels Later she would cite him as her favourite novelist and the greatest novelist of world literature She studied philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd Her major literary discoveries in university were the works of Edmond Rostand Friedrich Schiller and Fyodor Dostoevsky She admired Rostand for his richly romantic imagination and Schiller for his grand heroic scale She admired Dostoevsky for his sense of drama and his intense moral judgments but was deeply against his philosophy and his sense of life She continued to write short stories and screenplays and wrote sporadically in her diary which contained intensely anti Soviet ideas She also encountered the philosophical ideas of Nietzsche and loved his exaltation of the heroic and independent individual in Thus Spoke Zarathustra nevertheless she was strongly critical of his philosophy going so far as to attack it in the introductions of her novels Her greatest influence by far is Aristotle especially his work Organon Logic She considered him the greatest philosopher ever She then entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in to study screenwriting in late however she was granted a visa to visit American relatives She arrived in the United States in February at the age of twenty one After a brief stay with her relatives in Chicago she resolved never to return to the Soviet Union and set out for Los Angeles to become a screenwriter She then changed her name to Ayn Rand There is a story told that she named herself after the Remington Rand typewriter but recent evidence has proved that this is not the case She stated that her first name 'Ayn' was an adaptation of the name of a Finnish writer This may have been the Finnish Estonian author Aino Kallas.
 Major works.
Initially Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses.