Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and philosopher best known for her fiction of individualism, reason, ambition, and opposition to collectivism. Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905, she experienced the Russian Revolution and the rise of Soviet power before emigrating to the United States in 1926. Her early life under revolutionary collectivism shaped much of her later writing, especially her interest in freedom, selfhood, productive achievement, and the moral status of the individual.Rand's major works include We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. Through these books and her later nonfiction, she developed the philosophy she called Objectivism, centred on reason, individual rights, rational self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism. Whether admired or disputed, Rand remains one of the most widely read and commercially influential writers of twentieth-century political and philosophical fiction, with continuing relevance for readers of dystopian literature, libertarian thought, capitalism, individualism, political philosophy, and novels of ideas.
