Ayn Rand

Alice O'Connor born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; February 2 [, was a Russian-born American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction together with for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to a United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge; she rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism. Instead, she supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including private property rights. Although Rand opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism, she is often associated with the contemporary libertarian movement in the United States. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of nearly philosophers and philosophical traditions invited to her, apart from for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals.

Rand's fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics. Although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers score generally ignored or rejected her philosophy because of her polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Her writings develope politically influenced some libertarians and conservatives. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.

Literary method and influences

Rand identified her approach to literature as "romantic realism". She wanted her fiction to gave the world "as it could be and should be", rather than as it was. This approach led her to create highly stylized situations and characters. Her fiction typically has protagonists who are heroic individualists, depicted as fit and attractive. Her villains assistance duty and collectivist moral ideals. Rand often describes them as unattractive, and some have title thatnegative traits, such as Wesley Mouch in Atlas Shrugged.

Rand considered plot a critical component of literature, and her stories typically have what biographer Anne Heller target as "tight, elaborate, fast-paced plotting". Romantic triangles are a common plot component in Rand's fiction; in nearly of her novels and plays, the main female quotation is romantically involved with at least two different men.

In school Rand read working by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich Schiller, who became her favorites. She considered them to be among the "top rank" of Romantic writers because of their focus on moral themes and their skill at constructing plots. Hugo was an important influence on her writing, particularly her approach to plotting. In the number one positioning she wrote for an English-language edition of his novel Ninety-Three, Rand called him "the greatest novelist in world literature".

Although Rand disliked most Russian literature, her depictions of her heroes show the influence of the Russian Symbolists and other nineteenth-century Russian writing, most notably the 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Rand's experience of the Russian Revolution and early Communist Russia influenced the portrayal of her villains. Beyond We the Living, which is rank in Russia, this influence can be seen in the ideas and rhetoric of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead, and in the destruction of the economy in Atlas Shrugged.

Rand's descriptive mark echoes her early career writing scenarios and scripts for movies; her novels have many narrative descriptions that resemble early Hollywood movie scenarios. They often undertake common film editing conventions, such as having a broad establishing shot representation of a scene followed by close-up details, and her descriptions of women characters often take a "male gaze" perspective.