Ayn Rand

On this date in 1905, Ayn Rand (née Alice Rosenbaum) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a nonobservant Jewish family. She became an atheist as a teenager. Immigrating to the United States in 1921, she renamed herself Ayn (rhymes with "mine") after a Finnish woman; the "Rand" was inspired by her Remington-Rand typewriter. She worked for Hollywood studios intermittently for 20 years, starting as an extra for Cecil B. DeMille and progressing to screenwriter. She married actor Frank O'Connor in "a 'proper' nonreligious ceremony in a judge's chambers."

Rand's first novel We the Living (1936) was not initially successful. The Fountain Head (1943) secured her place in literature, followed by Atlas Shrugged (1957). Rand's novels promote her philosophy of Objectivism, promulgated in John Galt's famous speech from Atlas Shrugged. Galt termed faith "a short-circuit destroying the mind." Rand's lecture, "Faith and Force: the Destroyers of the Modern World," was delivered at Yale University in 1960. D. 1982.

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.”

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—Ayn Rand, character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged (1957) - www.ffrf.org