Educated at the University of Petrograd where she studied philosophy and history. Rand graduated in 1924. She had already decided on a literary career from an early age and had immersed herself in Western culture and literature during her formative years. Her experiences of the hardships of the Bolshevik regime convinced her to emigrate and, in 1925, she received permission to visit relatives in the United States. She arrived in New York in 1926 and spent some months in Chicago before travelling on to Hollywood with the object of becoming a screenwriter. Cecil B. DeMille gave her a job as an extra on the set of his film King of Kings, and over the next few years she had a number of non-writing jobs with his studio. In 1932, she sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Pictures. Her first novel, We The Living, was published in 1936, although she had completed it in 1934. In 1943, her most famous work, The Fountainhead, became a best-seller and she wrote the screenplay for the film which finally appeared in 1948. She moved to New York City in 1951 and worked full-time for the next few years on her masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, her final work of fiction which appeared in 1957. From 1962 to 1976, she published and edited various periodicals which provided platforms for her personal philosophy of Objectivism. Her works include Anthem (1938), For the New Intellectual (1961), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967), The Romantic Manifesto (1969), The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971) and Philosophy: Who Needs It? (1982-posthumous). |
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