Ayn Rand (1905-1982) won over millions to the the moral values of individualism and liberty which had fallen out of fashion more than a century ago. 

     There continues to be a lively interest in her ideas.  The 1997 release of Michael Paxton's documentary film Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life was nominated for an Academy Award.  In May 1999, Showtime aired The Passion of Ayn Rand starring Helen Mirren as Rand, Peter Fonda as her husband Frank O'Connor, Eric Stoltz as her principal associate Nathaniel Branden and Judy Delpy as Barbara Branden (both a Rand associate and author of the acclaimed biography on which the movie was based).

     Rand's philosophical novels, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), have sold some 20 million copies and continue to sell several hundred thousand copies a year -- without being advertised by publishers or assigned by professors.  According to a survey by the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club, Atlas Shrugged ranked second after the Bible as the that most influenced people's lives.

     Born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersberg, she emigrated to the United States in 1926, stayed for a while with relatives in Chicago, changed her name (taking "Ayn" from a Finnish author, "Rand" from her typewriter) and moved to Hollywood where she made herself a successful screenwriter.  Her play Night of January 16th was performed on Broadway.

     Rand's first novel was We the Living (1936), about the struggle to find liberty and love in Russia.  Her short book Anthem (1938) offered a bold affirmation of liberty, going beyond more famous anti-totalitarian novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984.

     The Fountainhead, about an architect battling collectivists all around him to maintain the integrity of his ideas, gradually gained a big following and was made into a movie in 1949.  Rand expanded on her views of liberty, sex, money and other issues in Atlas Shrugged.

See: 

"Creators and Producers" in Jim Powell, The Triumph of Liberty (New York: Free Press, 2000).  

"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 his only absolute."

-- Atlas Shrugged

Freedom vs. dictatorship

     "What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion...The issue is not slavery for a 'good' cause versus slavery for a 'bad' cause; the issue is not dictatorship by a 'good' gang versus dictatorship by a 'bad; gang. The issue is freedom versus dictatorship."

-- Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Free markets & liberty

     Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."

     "Capitalism cannot work with slave labor.  It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery.  It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out -- as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.

     "What greater virtue can one ascribe to a social system than the fact that it leaves no possibility for any man to serve his own interests by enslaving other men?  What nobler system could be desired by anyone whose goal is man's well-being?"

     "Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history -- a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world -- from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the oubreak of World War I in 1914.

     "It must be remembered that the political systems of the nineteenth century were not pure capitalism, but mixed economies.  The element of freedom, however, was dominant; it was as close to a century of capitalism as mankind has come."

-- Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

     "Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries."

-- For the New Intellectual

Ayn Rand to H.L. Mencken
July 28, 1934

     "I fully realize that I am a very 'green,' very helpless beginning who has the arrogance of embarking, single-handed, against what many call the irrevocable trend of our century.  I know that I am only a would-be David starting out against Goliath...I believe that man will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make it my duty to make him know it."

-- The Letters of Ayn Rand