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Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Reason and Individualism A guidepost for the American spirit of achievement and independence. By Michael S. Berliner Born 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual’s life on earth. She herself led a "rags to riches" life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence. The story of Ayn Rand's life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life: "a life more compelling than fiction." Born February 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age eight, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child's ideals. A year later she decided to become a writer: inspired by the hero of a children's story, who embodied "intelligence directed to a practical purpose," she had a "blinding picture" of people—not as they are but as they could be. In high school and college, she discovered two figures whom she never ceased to admire: Victor Hugo, for "the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness" of his stories, and Aristotle, as "the arch-realist and the advocate of the validity of man's mind." Escaping the tyranny and poverty of the U.S.S.R., she came to America in 1926, officially for a brief visit with relatives. A chance meeting with her favorite American director, Cecil B. DeMille, resulted in jobs as a movie extra and then a junior screenwriter. After periods of near-starvation, she sold her first play to Broadway and her first novel, We the Living, set in the Soviet tyranny she had escaped. With her first best-seller, The Fountainhead, in 1943, she presented her ideal man, individualist architect Howard Roark. But it was, she said, "only an overture" to her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957, a mystery story about the role of the mind in man's existence. With Atlas Shrugged her career as a fiction writer ended, but her career as a philosopher had just begun. Her philosophy—Objectivism—upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man's only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism—by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self). The only moral political system, she maintained, is laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to the collectivism of socialism, fascism or the welfare state), because it recognizes the inalienable right of an individual to act on the judgment of his own mind. Your life, she held, belongs to you and not to your country, God or your neighbors. Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism," she wrote in 1971, "but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows." This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual's right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian. Despite being outside the cultural mainstream, her novels became best-sellers and her books sell more today than ever before—half a million copies per year. There is a reason that Atlas Shrugged placed second in a Library of Congress survey about most influential books. There is a reason that her works are considered life-altering by so many readers. She had an exalted view of man and created inspiring fictional heroes. A sui generis philosopher, who looked at the world anew, Ayn Rand has long puzzled the intellectual establishment. Academia has usually met her views with antagonism or avoidance, unable to fathom that she was an individualist but not a subjectivist, an absolutist but not a dogmatist. And they have thus ignored her original solutions to such seemingly intractable problems as how to ground values in facts. But even in academia her ideas are finding more acceptance, e.g., university fellowships and a subgroup within the American Philosophical Association to study Objectivism. Ayn Rand left a legacy in defense of reason and freedom that serves as a guidepost for the American spirit—especially pertinent today when America and what it stands for are under assault. Michael S. Berliner is a member of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Introducing Objectivism
Copyright © Estate of Ayn Rand. All rights reserved. Reproduction or linking is strictly prohibited. This recording is available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore on CD, including "'Conflicts' of Men's Interests," an explanation of why the interests of rational men do not clash. To learn more about Objectivism, visit the Web site of the Ayn Rand Institute.
A Short Biography Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine she decided to make fiction writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after discovering the novels Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired. During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school. The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father's pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be. When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the State University of Petrograd to study history and philosophy. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her greatest pleasures were operettas and Western films. Long an admirer of cinema, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting. In late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter. On Ayn Rand's second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later. After struggling for several years at various non-writing jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., she sold her first screenplay, "Red Pawn," to Universal Pictures in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1934 but was rejected by numerous publishers, until Macmillan in the United States and Cassell in Great Britain published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels, it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny. She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as "he could be and ought to be." The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism. Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but wartime restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for Hal Wallis Productions, she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged. Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles which make such individuals possible. Thereafter, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism, which she characterized as "a philosophy for living on earth." She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for six books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment. Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totaling more than twenty million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.
My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir
Copyright © 1987 Leonard Peikoff. All rights reserved. Reproduction or linking is strictly prohibited.
In this talk from 1987, Dr. Peikoff offers moving insights into the real Ayn Rand—the thinker, the artist, the teacher, the passionate valuer of the best within man. Dr. Peikoff's talk—including the audience question and answer period that followed—is available on VHS video, audio CD and audiocassette from the Ayn Rand Bookstore.
A Selected Bibliography The following selected bibliography and list of sound recordings consist of works published or edited by Ayn Rand during her lifetime, including lectures given under her auspices, as well as anthologies and secondary literature published after her death. The items listed below incorporate materials unique to the Ayn Rand Archives holdings. Researchers interested in studying the development of works published by Ayn Rand during her lifetime may consult the Ayn Rand Papers. WORKS PUBLISHED DURING AYN RAND'S LIFETIME Novels Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957; New York: Plume, 1999.
Books and Essays Rand, Ayn. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982; New York: Signet, 1984.
Drama Rand, Ayn. Night of January 16th. New York: World, 1968; Revised edition incorporating small editorial changes regarded as definitive per Rand's correspondence. New York: Plume, 1987.
Periodicals Edited The Objectivist Newsletter, 1962–65. New York: The Objectivist, Inc.; Connecticut: Second Renaissance Books, 1991.
Selected Lecture Courses The following lectures presented under Ayn Rand's auspices develop Objectivist views not addressed by her in print. They include expositions of Objectivist philosophical concepts and the Objectivist position on key issues in the history of philosophy. With extensive question-and-answer sessions. Peikoff, Leonard. Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present. Twelve lectures. (1970) Connecticut: Second Renaissance Books, 2000.
WORKS PUBLISHED AFTER AYN RAND'S DEATH The following compilations contain items from the Ayn Rand Papers which have been edited for the general reader. Anthologies Peikoff, Leonard, ed. The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. Essays by Rand and others. New York: New American Library, 1989; New York: Meridian, 1990.
Early Writings Berliner, Michael S., ed.
Russian
Writings on Hollywood. Trans. Dina Garmong. Essays by A[lisa] Rosenbaum [Ayn Rand] and an
untranslated Introduction by her Russian publisher, 1926; Los Angeles: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999. Journals, Letters and Marginalia Rand, Ayn. Journals of Ayn Rand. Edited by David Harriman. Translated by Dina Garmong. New York: Dutton, 1997; New York: Plume, 1999.
Lecture Course Transcriptions Rand, Ayn. The Art of Fiction. Edited by Tore Boeckmann. Edited transcript of the audio portion of Ayn Rand's "Literary Class," given privately, New York, 1959. New York: Plume, 2000.
Selections Binswanger, Harry, ed. The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. Key ideas of the Objectivist philosophy culled from Ayn Rand's writings; includes excerpts from the works of Leonard Peikoff. New York: New American Library, 1986; Meridian, 1988.
SECONDARY LITERATURE The secondary literature appearing below is interpretive and incorporates material from the Archives's holdings. Biographical Britting, Jeff. Ayn Rand. An illustrated biography including a timeline and bibliography. New York, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004.
Exposition and Commentary Binswanger, Harry. "Ayn Rand's Philosophic Achievement," The Objectivist Forum, June, August and October, 1982.
Lectures Berliner, Michael S. "Treasures From the Archives." Presented at Lyceum International, London, England, 1995.
Documentary Film Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. Produced, directed, written by Michael Paxton; associate-produced and music composed by Jeff Britting. 1998. 35 mm, 2 hrs., 24 min. Santa Monica: Strand Releasing.
Audio CD Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life—Music, Narration and Dialogue. 1999. Produced and music composed by Jeff Britting; also produced by Michael Paxton. West Hollywood, Calif.: A G Media Corp., Ltd.
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Ayn Rand's Life and Works | Centenary Activities | Online Exhibit | The Ayn Rand® Archives | Ayn Rand, a Biography | Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, the Film Copyright © 2005 Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited without permission. ARI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions to ARI in the United States are tax-exempt to the extent provided by law. |
Miss Rand offers a capsule description of her philosophy.
Streaming audio, 28 minutes:
Leonard Peikoff, a philosopher, is Ayn Rand's legal and intellectual heir. He was a close associate of Ayn Rand for thirty years, and today is the pre-eminent spokesman for her philosophy of Objectivism. He is author of 
