Ayn rand education
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ICON
Novelist
Howard Roark. John Galt. Dagny Taggart. Hank Rearden. The heroes of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are famous because they’re unique. Rand’s stories, full of drama and intrigue, portray businessmen, inventors, architects, workers and scientists as noble, passionate figures. Where else will you find an inventor who must rediscover the word “I,” a young woman who defies a nation embracing communism, or an industrialist who must disguise himself as a playboy? A philosopher-pirate? An architect who is fiercely selfish yet enormously benevolent? A man who vows to stop the motor of the world — and does?
In creating her novels, Rand sought to make real her exalted view of man and of life — “like a beacon,” she wrote, “raised over the dark crossroads of the world, saying ‘This is possible.’” For millions of readers, the experience of entering Rand’s universe proves unforgettable.
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We all have a philosophy of life, and we can usually look back and see that its seeds were planted early. Influenced by time and chance, a little nurture and a little nature, history and experience, these early ideas mature: the imagined realities of childhood give way to more reasonable perceptions. And as the innocence of a child’s sense of the world erodes over time, the fantasyland of first insights is reworked into the more pragmatic banners that guide an adult life.
It’s therefore unusual to find someone who not only retains those early views but builds a whole superstructure of philosophical meaning atop them. Ayn Rand was such a person.
“I have held the same philosophy I now hold, for as far back as I can remember,” she reminisced at age 52. “I have learned a great deal through the years and expanded my knowledge of details . . . but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals.”
At the heart of her belief is the conclusion that humans are heroic beings, meant to overcome nature through the power of rational thought. “Check your premises,” she would oft
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Ayn Rand
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 1962.
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 1926, 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, whi
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