About Ayn Rand

"We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write." So said novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures of the twentieth century. Her books have sold over twenty-three million copies worldwide, and her novels, alone, continue to sell at the rate of roughly 300,000 a year to generation after generation of new admirers. Her provocative moral philosophy has had a powerful and continuing influence on our culture. When the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club recently conducted a nationwide survey to discover the books that had most influenced people's lives, Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED was named more often than any book except the Bible.

We the Living, her first novel, was published in 1936, re-issued by Random House in 1959, and NAL printed 400,000 paperback copies in 1960. While Rand is best-known for her later novels, "The Fountainhead" (published in 1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (published in 1957), "We the Living" has, itself, sold over two million copies and, along with "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," continues to sell each year. Over 65 years after its first publication, "We the Living" can still be found in virtually every bookstore in the country.

Years after her death, Rand's influence continues to grow: annual sales of her books have reached the astonishing rate of 500,000 per year; a big budget movie version of "Atlas Shrugged" was announced in 2004; Oliver Stone is interested in directing a new film version of "The Fountainhead" --the original film starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal; two institutes conduct classes on her philosophy; there are over 60 Ayn Rand fan clubs on college campuses; and Web sites devoted to her work flourish. Three new biographies on Rand were published in the last four years alone.

Since the background of "We the Living" is Soviet Russia, and since Rand grew up under the Soviets, people have always speculated about whether the novel, on which this movie is based, is autobiographical. In fact, there are many parallels between Rand's early life under Communism and that of her fictional heroine, Kira.

Ayn Rand, born Alice Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg (renamed Leningrad during the Soviet era), was twelve years old when the Communists took power. She was twelve when she rejected -- consciously and indignantly -- the ideology which she saw plastered on posters everywhere: that man must live for the state.

Until the revolution, she had lived comfortably (her father owned a pharmacy). But after a three-year exile in the Crimea, she returned with her family to Leningrad -- and to a nightmare universe. Like Kira in "We the Living," she hated the sordidness of Soviet life, the unrelenting search for bare necessities. She suffered through long years of near-starvation and lived with the constant threat of potentially fatal, lice-borne diseases such as typhoid and cholera. And like Kira, she witnessed political purges during her university years, narrowly missing being purged from Leningrad University, herself. (Her fictional heroine was not so fortunate.) When an outspoken young fellow student was exiled to Siberia, an outraged Ayn Rand could not keep silent: "All of you," she told a Communist, "will hang from the lampposts of the city, one day!" And for that dangerous indiscretion, she paid the price of terror. For a long time afterward, she would wait for the knock on the door that could send her and her family to Siberia.

It never came. But suffocating under the totalitarian regime of the Communists, wanting desperately to write the kind of novels which would never be permitted in the Soviet Union -- stories which dramatized her concept of the highest human potential -- Rand was obsessed with the desire to break free. Having fallen in love with America through American movies, captivated by the gaiety and no-holds-barred sense of life she saw on the screen in Leningrad, she was determined to live in what she regarded as her spiritual homeland.

She was twenty-one years old when she achieved her goal. Through the intercession of relatives in Chicago, she was able to obtain a six-month visa for the United States and a Russian passport. It was her passport to freedom. She later told a friend that she arrived in this country with three things: fifty dollars, a battered typewriter, and her vision of America.

At the end of 1924 she arrived in the United States and headed for Hollywood. The next eight years was the first of two "Hollywood periods" in Rand's life. A chance encounter with Cecil B. de Mille on her first day in Hollywood led to a job as a movie extra in de Mille films, later to the wardrobe department at RKO, then to a job as a junior scriptwriter, where she wrote outlines of screen treatments until the de Mille studio closed.

In 1929, she became a United States citizen. The Soviet Union and all it represented was behind her. Except for what she would write about it.

In 1930, while working in the wardrobe department of RKO Pictures, she devoted what little spare time she had to writing her first novel. Four years later, she sent the manuscript of "We the Living" to her New York agent. In a foreword to the 1959 Random House edition, she wrote: "'We the Living' is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life . . . . " She had written a novel that was, at once, a passionate love story, a rebellion against tyranny, and a hymn to the unconquered human spirit.

At that time, the United States and most of Western Europe was swept by a post depression wave of liberal and socialist ideology - "The Red Decade". Her new novel was almost uniformly rejected by literary critics and the intelligentsia of the time. Even so, the book gradually attained a popular following.

In 1934 she wrote a play ("The Night of January 16th") which took her to New York City and the successful run of that play on Broadway. It was while living in New York that she wrote the novel which would make her famous. When "The Fountainhead" was published, reviews were negative or vague about its core theme of intransigent individualism. But two years after publication, word-of-mouth had pushed sales to 100,000 -- and bestsellerdom. Ayn Rand had found her audience. Within three years, sales exceeded 400,000, and by 1949, the novel reappeared on bestseller lists and sold 50,000 copies within six months of the release of Warner Brothers' movie version.

It was the movie which took Rand back to Hollywood. In 1943, she signed a contract with Warner Brothers to write the screenplay. Afterward, she stayed on as a part-time screenwriter for Hal Wallis, then affiliated with Paramount Pictures. (Two of her successful adaptations were "Love Letters" and "You Came Along.") The rest of her time was devoted to what was to become her magnum opus: "Atlas Shrugged."

Rand returned to New York to complete "Atlas" -- a novel which was to take her thirteen years to research and write. She saw "Atlas Shrugged" as a philosophical novel which challenged the cultural tradition of two-and-a-half-thousand years. Predictably, its publication unleashed a storm of controversy which never abated throughout her lifetime, and which continues to this day. Playboy Magazine called the novel "perhaps the most fiercely damned and admired bestseller of the decade."

The sales figures of this, her last novel, would prove to be phenomenal, bringing her worldwide and lasting fame. A series of lectures and publications by some of her close associates began to disseminate the ideas dramatized in her novels. A modest effort centered in New York City soon grew into a national movement, then international. Rand, invited to speak at universities throughout the country, proved to be a powerful speaker who invariably attracted overflow audiences and new readers. Her novels became modern classics, taught in classrooms everywhere. Interest in and curiosity about her became intense. What was she like? What would she write next? When would her next novel appear? Her next article or speech? When would there be another Ayn Rand movie?

She continued to write non-fiction books and articles, a newsletter, a magazine, in which she and her associates elaborated on aspects of her philosophy --attracting still more admirers. Her novels had always drawn mail from around the world. After "Atlas Shrugged," it became an avalanche. The mail from her appearances on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" was an unprecedented 3,000 letters.

By the late sixties, Ayn Rand was an international figure with a fiercely devoted following. That following remains to this day.

Ayn Rand served as editor-In-chief of "The Objectivist," a monthly journal from 1962 to 1971, which was devoted to the propogation of her philosophy. After "The Objectivlst" ceased publication, she began "The Ayn Rand Letter" which she wrote until 1976.

Rand died in 1982. But a 1986 bestselling biography, "The Passion of Ayn Rand," dramatically demonstrates her vast and continuing influence on people both here and abroad; on the young and the old; the educated and uneducated; white collar and blue; on people in politics; in the arts; on businessmen; educators; philosophers; college students.

Ayn Rand's ideas have become a firmly entrenched part of Western culture.

Other books by Rand: ANTHEM; THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 16TH; THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS; THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO; FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL