March 6: Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum), Russian-born author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, among other philosophical novels and screenplays, died on this date in 1982. Rand developed the philosophy of Objectivism, which advocated human reason as the path to knowledge, disdained religious faith, emphasized the quest for individual happiness, and promoted laissez-faire capitalism as the least coercive, most liberatory economic system. She lived in Russia during the revolution and studied philosophy and history before coming to the U.S. in 1925 and establishing herself as a moderately successful screenwriter. The Fountainhead, a dystopian novel about totalitarianism, became a bestseller in 1943 and launched her career as a pop-culture oracle; the book has sold over 3.5 million copies. Rand soon became a Republican Party activist and a very vocal, very visible anti-Communist. Her novels were generally panned by critics, even in the rightwing press, yet her influence as an against-the-grain conservative and writer who romanticized individualism grew by leaps and bounds. “Without Ayn Rand, says David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, “the libertarian movement would not exist.” Her fiction is often read by young people and has been described by Rand’s biographer, Jennifer Burns, as “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” In 1991, a survey for the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club found Atlas Shrugged (1957) to be second only to the Bible as “the most influential book” in club members’ lives.

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” —Ayn Rand