February 2: Ayn Rand

It was on this date, February 2, 1905, that Objectivist philosopher and author Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum to Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. She always knew she wanted to be a writer. As a young girl, Alissa witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and saw firsthand the brutality of the Soviet regime. The Communists nationalized her father’s shop, reducing the family to poverty. At age 21 she got permission to travel to the US and, after a brief stay in Chicago, traveled to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter.

It was 1925, Lenin was dead, but fearing for the safety of her family still in Russia, Alissa Rosenbaum changed her name to Ayn Rand. She published We the Living in 1936, The Fountainhead in1943, and her most memorable if unreadable work, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957 (film, 2011). Her novels outline her philosophy of Objectivism. “My philosophy, in essence,” she wrote in her Appendix to Atlas Shrugged, “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.”

Briefly, because Objectivism teaches that reality exists independently of perception, there is no cause for belief in the supernatural; that reason is a sufficient tool for perceiving and dealing with reality; that because humans are rational, determinism is rejected: humans are not victims of forces beyond their control; that because humans are an end in themselves (an idea she borrowed from the despised