Authorial+Background

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. She and her family lived in Russia, supported by her fathers pharmacy. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution saw them forced out into Crimea, and the family business was confiscated by the Communists. Eventually she and her family were able to return to Russia, and she was one of the first females to attend the now co-ed University of Petrograd. After graduating in 1924, she obtained permission from the government to visit family in America in 1925. While proclaiming that the visit would be short, she was determined never to return. One in America, she worked in Hollywood as a junior screen writer, penning her first original novel "We the Living" in 1934; it was published in 1936. Her first worldwide hit, "The Fountain Head" was started in 1935, and it was published in 1943. This success gave her financial success, as well as promoting her as a champion of individualism. "Atlas Shrugged" her final novel which she considered her Magnum Opus, was published in 1957. 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, before dying on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.

Information taken from the Ayn Rand Institute biography of Ayn Rand.

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