Ayn rand author biography search

“Rand . . . appears, in Popoff’s account, as a direct ancestor of our own era’s massively online authors: a relentless polemicist and talented propagandist who knew how to stay on message, and who was intolerant of nuance in her characters and in her life; nakedly ambitious, often confusing friendship with uncritical adulation and unqualified support; hyperaggressive but also easily wounded by the slightest criticism.”—Marco Roth, Washington Post

“A rare glimpse into the Jewishness of Ayn Rand, the U.S. right’s favorite novelist.”—Haaretz

“Charmingly anecdotal and revealing. . . . [Popoff] takes us deep into the life and work of this strange woman.”—Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Literary Review

“The reader does emerge with a better sense of the person behind Rand’s influential and popular books.”—MoneyWeek

“A compelling portrait of a woman driven to succeed and impress the world with her creative energy and ideas.”—Joshua Rubenstein, author of Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life

Ayn Rand was finally getting her due. After Time magazine had called her masterpiece—the novel Atlas Shrugged—“a nightmare,” after the eminent philosopher Sidney Hook had savaged her in the New York Times Book Review, she had been invited to Harvard to present a paper on her philosophy of art. Her host, John Hospers, a rising young philosopher from Brooklyn College, belonged to the American Society for Aesthetics, which was meeting in Cambridge in October

Rand’s appearance at Harvard marked a pinnacle in her already astonishing career. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, the eldest daughter of affluent Jewish parents, she fled Russia in , embittered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which had destroyed her family’s livelihood. Upon arrival in New York, she assumed the more glamorous nom de plume Ayn Rand and headed for Hollywood.

Rand’s new name was the first of her many reinventions. She began as a hack Hollywood writer but then wrote two plays and a novel. Soon she was a political activist, too, working to defeat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which she feared was only the first step toward communism in America. Her second novel, The Fountainhead, published in , was treasured by a small band of conservatives who applauded her attack upon collectivism

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