Ayn Rand
From BookJive
|
|
|
| Born: | February 2, 1905 |
| Died: | March 6, 1982 |
| Residence: | |
| School: | St. Petersburg University |
| Contact: | |
| Website: | |
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher,best known for developing the philosophy of Objectivism and for writing the novels We the Living, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and the novella Anthem.
Rand's writing (both fiction and non-fiction) emphasizes the philosophic concepts of objective reality in metaphysics, reason in epistemology, and rational egoism in ethics. In politics she was a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and a staunch defender of individual rights, believing that the sole function of a proper government is protection of individual rights (including property rights).
[edit] Biography
Rand was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and was the eldest of three daughters (Alisa, Natasha, and Nora) of a Jewish family. Her parents, Zinovy Zacharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum, were agnostic and largely non-observant. From an early age, she displayed an interest in literature and films. She started writing screenplays and novels at the age of seven.
Her mother taught 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 by Maurice Champagne, called The Mysterious Valley. Throughout her youth, she read the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père 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 cited him as her favorite novelist and the greatest novelist of world literature.
In February 1926, Rand arrived in the United States at the age of 21, entering by ship through New York City, which would ultimately become her home. She was profoundly moved by the city's skyline, later describing it in one of her novels, The Fountainhead: "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline, the sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."
After a brief stay with her relatives in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the Soviet Union, and set out for Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Already using Rand as a Cyrillic contraction of her surname, she then adopted the name Ayn, an adaptation of a "Finnish feminine name", most likely "Aino" or "Aina". She might have been referring to the Finnish author Aino Kallas. Her surname may also have come from the Estonian word rand, meaning coast or shore.
Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses. A chance face-to-face meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to a job as an extra in his film King of Kings, and subsequent work as a script reader. She also worked as the head of the costume department at RKO Studios. While working on the film, she intentionally bumped into an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor, who caught her eye. The two married on April 15, 1929, and remained married for fifty years, until O'Connor's death in 1979 at the age of 82. In 1931, Rand became a naturalized citizen of the United States; she was fiercely proud of the United States, and in later years said to the graduating class at West Point, "I can say - not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and aesthetic roots - that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."
Rand viewed herself equally as a novelist and a philosopher, as she said "(I am) both, and for the same reason." It has been suggested that Rand's practice of presenting her philosophy in fiction and non-fiction books aimed at a general audience, rather than publications in peer-reviewed journals, have encouraged a negative view. Rand's defenders note that she is part of a long tradition of authors who wrote philosophically rich fiction - including Dante, John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus, and that philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre presented their philosophies in both fictional and non-fictional forms.
In an article about Rand, that appeared in The Economist in 1991, it is stated that "Rand’s novels sell some 300,000 copies a year, exhorting readers to think big about themselves, build big and earn big. New editions of all her books carry postcards for readers who might be inclined to learn more about Objectivism, the author’s credo, a blending of free markets, reason and individualism."
Her first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn in 1932 to Universal Studios: "Von Sternberg later considered it for Dietrich, but Russian scenarios were out of favour and it was ditched." Rand then wrote the play The Night of January 16th in 1934, which was produced on Broadway. The play was a courtroom drama in which a jury chosen from the audience decided the verdict, leading to one of two possible endings.
Rand then published the novel, We the Living (1936), and the novella, Anthem (1938): "Rand described We the Living as the most autobiographical of her novels, its theme being the brutality of life under communist rule in Russia." Its harsh anti-communist tone met with mixed reviews in the U.S., where the period of The Great Depression was sometimes known as "The Red Decade" in reference to the high-water mark of sympathy for socialist ideals. Stephen Cox, at The Objectivist Center, observed that We the Living "was published at the height of Russian socialism's popularity among leaders of American opinion. It failed to attract an audience."
Frank O'Connor and Ayn Rand spent the summer of 1937 in Stony Creek, Connecticut, while Frank worked in summer stock theatre, and Ayn planned Anthem, a dystopian vision of a futuristic society where collectivism has triumphed. Anthem did not find a publisher in the United States and was first published in England.
Rand's Objectivist philosophy encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and aesthetics. Along with Nathaniel Branden, his wife Barbara, and others including Alan Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff (jokingly designated "The Collective"), Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy.
In 1950 Rand moved to 120 East 34th Street in New York City, and formed a group with the deliberately ironic name "The Collective," which included future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden), who had been profoundly influenced by The Fountainhead. According to Branden, "I wrote Miss Rand a letter in 1949...[and] I was invited to her home for a personal meeting in March, 1950, a month before I turned twenty."
The group originally started out as informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy; later the Collective would proceed to play a larger, more formal role, helping edit Atlas Shrugged and promoting Rand's philosophy through the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which Branden established to promote her philosophy. Many Collective members gave lectures at the NBI and in cities across the United States, while others wrote articles for its sister newsletter, The Objectivist.
In 1973, she was briefly reunited with her youngest sister, Nora, who still lived in the Soviet Union.[38] Although Rand had written 1,200 letters to her family in the Soviet Union, and had attempted to bring them to the United States, she had ceased contacting them in 1937 after reading a notice in the post office that letters from Americans might imperil Russians at risk from Stalinist repression. Rand received a letter from Nora in 1973 and invited her and her husband to America; her sister's views had changed and, to Rand's disappointment, Nora voluntarily returned to the USSR.
Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974, and conflicts continued in the wake of the break with Branden and the subsequent collapse of the NBI. Many of her closest "Collective" friends began to part ways, and during the late 1970s, her activities within the formal Objectivist movement began to decline, a situation which increased after the death of her husband on November 9, 1979. One of her final projects was work on a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. She had also planned to write another novel, To Lorne Dieterling, but had only written "preliminary sketches."
Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982 at her 34th Street home in New York City, years after having successfully battled cancer, and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York. David Kelley read Kipling's poem "If" at the graveside. Rand's funeral was attended by some of her prominent followers, including Alan Greenspan. A six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket.
Rand's novels continue to be widely sold and read, with more than 22 million books sold (as of 2005), and 500,000 more being sold each year. Following her death, continued conflict within the Objectivist movement led to establishment of independent organizations claiming to be her intellectual heirs. Rand and Objectivism are less well known outside North America, although there are pockets of interest in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Her novels are reported to be popular in India and to be gaining an increasingly wider audience in Africa. She also enjoyed some popularity in Israel, through the early work of Moshe Kroy. Generally, her work has had little effect on academic philosophy; her followers have been largely drawn from the non-academic world. However, in recent years there has been notable interest in Ayn Rand's philosophy in academic philosophy. The Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship offers resources to study Objectivism at the University of Texas at Austin, Ashland University in Ohio, and the University of Pittsburgh. At the University of Pittsburgh, professors James Lennox and Allan Gotthelf head the research. Both scholars are renowned for their illuminations of Aristotle's writings. Ayn Rand in Academia Duke University's professor, Gary Hull, is a member of the Ayn Rand Institute and has lectured courses incorporating Objectivist literature and discussion. Professor Allan Gotthelf also points to certain modern trends in academic philosophy which make philosophers more receptive to Objectivist ideas. Chief among them are the notions of essence and concept as epistemological, developments in virtue theory ethics, and very current projects in normative philosophies of science and logic.
Rand (age 75) as she appeared on the Phil Donahue show on April 29, 1980, in her first public appearance since the death of her husband.The column "Book Notes" of the New York Times, reported in 1991 that in a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, when asked what the most influential book in their lives was, Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice. The most popular choice was the Bible.
Numerous prominent individuals have acknowledged that Rand greatly influenced their lives, including: Harry Binswanger, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, James Clavell, Edward Cline, Chris Cox, Mark Cuban, Paul DePodesta, Steve Ditko, Terry Goodkind, Allan Gotthelf, Alan Greenspan, Hugh Hefner, Erika Holzer, John Hospers, Angelina Jolie, David Kelley, Billie Jean King, Anton LaVey, Rush Limbaugh, Frank Miller, Leonard Peikoff, Ronald Reagan, George Reisman, John Ridpath, Robert Ringer, Tracey Ross, Kay Nolte Smith, Tara Smith, John Stossel, Margaret Thatcher, Clarence Thomas, Vince Vaughn, and many others. Rand's philosophy of Objectivism continues to influence workers in the arts, business, and science. "The Atlasphere," an online community devoted to admirers of Rand, maintains a blog citing Rand's influence on popular or newsworthy figures who cite the influence of Rand's works on their lives, while "Randex" updates a list of recent media references to Rand or her work.
[edit] Books
|
|
|
- (1934)
|
|
|
- (1936)
|
|
|
- (1938)
|
|
|
- (1943) Rand's first major professional success came with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead (1943), which she wrote over a period of seven years. The novel was rejected by twelve publishers. It was finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house, thanks mainly to a member of the editorial board, Archibald Ogden, who praised the book in the highest terms ("If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you.") and finally prevailed. Eventually, The Fountainhead was a worldwide success, bringing Rand fame and financial security. In 1949 it was made into a major motion picture. In the sixty years since it was published, Rand's novel has sold six million copies, and continues to sell about 100,000 copies per year.
|
|
|
- (1957) "Atlas", the largest sculptural work at Rockefeller Center in New York City, by Lee Lawrie and Rene Chambellan, in the Art Deco style. (1936) Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957. Due to the success of The Fountainhead, the initial printing was 100,000 copies, and the book went on to become an international bestseller. (The frequent claim that Atlas Shrugged was later found to be the "second most influential book in America, after The Bible," may be an exaggeration of the findings of one 1991 survey; however, it has been cited in numerous interviews as the book that most influenced the subject.)
- Atlas Shrugged is often seen as Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction. In its appendix, she offered this summary:
- "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
- The theme of Atlas Shrugged is "The role of man's mind in society." Rand upheld the industrialist as one of the most admirable members of any society and fiercely opposed the popular resentment accorded to industrialists. This led her to envision a novel wherein the industrialists of America go on strike and retreat to a mountainous hideaway. The American economy and its society in general slowly start to collapse. The government responds by increasing the already stifling controls on industrial concerns. The novel, which includes elements of mystery and science fiction, deals with issues as wide-ranging as sex, music, medicine, politics and human ability.
|
|
|
- (1961)
|
|
|
- (1964)
|
|
|
- (1966)
|
|
|
- (1967)
|
|
|
- (1969)
|
|
|
- (1971)
