Ayn Rand was born in early February in the year of 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia amidst a sudden uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, when Czar Nicholas II’s army open fire on more than thirty thousand civilians. Her parents, who gave her the name Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, were ages thirty-four and twenty-five at the time of Rand’s birth and had been married for just nine months. Her mother had been trained and worked as a dentist but halted her career when she was married and became pregnant, and her father was a pharmaceutical chemist who also owned and managed a small shop on the bottom floor of their home. She was born into a Jewish family and grew up in an often dangerous and volatile environment because of her family’s religion. She was the eldest of three sisters and though her surrounding were at times violent, her family was very fortunate financially.
In high school, Rand determined herself to be an Atheist and in 1921, she was admitted to Petrograd State University, free of charge. She graduated in 1924 and was granted a visa to travel to the United States to visit relatives. She immediately loved the states and decided to stay to pursue her career. After spending six months with her relatives in Chicago, she headed west to Hollywood, intending to pursue a career as a screenwriter. It was there that she met her future husband, Frank O’Connor, with whom she spent the majority of her life with until his death fifty years later. Rand and her geographically distant father grew suddenly closer as they wrote letters back and forth, and Rand later confessed to having feelings for her father and being very attracted to him. However, she continued on with her life in America and began writing her first novel, The Fountainhead, in 1935. She continued writing quite vigorously, publishing several other novels, novelettes and philosophies almost up until her death on March 6 of 1982, where she died peacefully in her Manhattan apartment.

Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986. Print.


Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.