Ayn Rand — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg on 2 February 1905, the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Rosenbaum, in a prosperous Jewish family. She was twelve when the revolutions of 1917 took place in the city. In 1918 her father's pharmacy was nationalised, and the family moved for a time to the Crimea before returning to what had become Petrograd.
She studied at Petrograd State University, where women had recently been admitted, graduating in 1924, and then enrolled at the State Technicum for Screen Arts to study screenwriting. She saw many American films, and in late 1925 obtained permission to visit relatives in Chicago. She left the Soviet Union in January 1926, arriving in New York that February, and did not return.
After a few months in Chicago she went to Hollywood, where on her second day she met the director Cecil B. DeMille, who gave her work as an extra and then as a junior screenwriter. She took the name Ayn Rand, married the actor Frank O'Connor in 1929, and became an American citizen in 1931. She worked in the costume department at RKO while writing.
Her first novel, We the Living (1936), set in Petrograd in the years after the revolution, was the closest she came to autobiography. The Fountainhead (1943), the story of an uncompromising architect, became a bestseller after slow beginnings and was filmed in 1949 with Gary Cooper. Atlas Shrugged (1957) was her most ambitious and widely read novel. Around her fiction she built a philosophical system she called Objectivism, set out in essays and lectures and promoted by a movement of followers in the 1960s.
Her books have sold in the tens of millions and remain both widely read and sharply disputed; academic philosophers have largely kept their distance, while her influence on American political and business thought has been considerable. Her two younger sisters remained in the Soviet Union; she met her sister Nora again on a visit to the United States in 1974. She died in New York on 6 March 1982, aged seventy-seven.
"Emigrated from Petrograd to the United States via New York in 1926, age 21."
Migration storyTracing the roots — St. Petersburg
Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905, she lived through the revolution there; her father's pharmacy was nationalised in 1918. She left the Soviet Union for the United States in 1926 and set her first novel, We the Living, in Petrograd.
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St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""I came here with one purpose: to achieve the kind of existence I had thought of as possible — and wanted — and had not found in Russia.""