There was a talented woman, born in Tsarist Russia, when she was 12 years old, when the October Revolution broke out.
She completed her schooling in the Soviet Union, but many of her views were at odds with the "mainstream.".
At the age of 20, she obtained her dream visa to go abroad, came to the United States the following year, and has since been separated from her homeland.
In the United States, she wrote many thoughtful works, which are unique in the literary world.
She spent her life shouting for the liberal system and left behind this famous saying:
She's Ayn Rand.
1. The girl who burned the diary
In 1905, in St. Petersburg, Tsarist Russia, a Jewish couple with the surname "Rosenbaum" had a daughter named Alice Zynovievna Rosenbaum. She was the future Ayn Rand.
The Rosenbaums, though of Jewish descent, do not believe in Judaism and have a general negative attitude toward various creationisms.
This worldview had a great influence on Ayn Rand.
At home, Ayn Rand subscribed to a magazine of fiction aimed at male readers, and young Ayn Rand was illiterate early and often flipped through.
As a child, she liked an Indian officer in the story: through personal efforts, he achieved outstanding martial arts in the mysterious Indian Valley.
The pursuit of individual heroism continued throughout Ayn Rand's life.
In 1917, the October Revolution broke out in Russia, and St. Petersburg was on the cusp of this great upheaval.
Ayn Rand's father was a pharmacy owner, but the pharmacy he ran for many years was confiscated by the emerging Bolshevik regime.
The family tried to escape the storm of the revolution and moved the family to Crimea, which had not yet been affected by the Red Storm.
During this time, Ayn Rand began to write a diary, in which there were many complaints about Soviet Russia.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long, and four years later, the Soviets captured Crimea.
Ayn Rand, 16, had to burn his diary with his own hands.
But she hated a society that could not be freely expressed.
She has always had excellent academic performance and was admitted to a university in St. Petersburg.
During Ayn Rand University, the emerging Soviet Russia became more and more consolidated. She began to look for various opportunities to try to leave the country.
2. If the United States is threatened by war, I am willing to protect it with my flesh
Shortly after graduating from college, Ayn Rand managed to get a visa to visit relatives in the United States, and in early 1926, at the age of 21, she went abroad for the first time and came to the United States by ship.
The ship was moored in the port of New York, and Ayn Rand saw the skyscrapers of New York and was full of longing for the city.
"I'm willing to give up the world's most spectacular sunset scene and say goodbye to my homeland forever, just to see the skyscraper complex of New York City."
Since then, she has taken root in the United States.
She hadn't studied English before, but she learned the language in a short period of time and started writing.
She officially changed her name to "Ayn Rand", a more common name in English-speaking countries.
Ayn Rand came to Hollywood to write scripts for a living and sometimes as an actor.
While working in Hollywood, she met a young actor, Frank O'Connor, who fell in love with him and pursued him.
The two married in 1929, a marriage that lasted 50 years until O'Connor died in 1979 at the age of 82.
During the Great Depression, Ayn Rand was not unemployed. She did not have the shelf of "Miss Petite" or "literati", and took the initiative to apply for some "low-end jobs", such as scribes, extras, etc. Although life is not easy, it is also easy to worry about food and clothing.
As a playwright, Ayn Rand achieved some success.
She created "The Red Pawn" in the early 1930s and was bought by Universal Pictures.
In 1934, Ayn Rand completed The Night of January 16, which was performed on Broadway.
This is a trial drama, and the unique thing is that the audience is selected as jurors during the performance, so that the play may have two endings. Such an approach was very novel at the time.
In addition to working on screenplay, Ayn Rand wrote a number of novels, including The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
These novels caused a lot of controversy at the beginning of their existence, but they have since won many praise and honors, and they are still often sold today.
Ayn Rand had a strong sense of identity with the individualistic United States.
She considered the United States to be her own country, and during World War II, she gave a speech at West Point saying, "If america is threatened by war, I am willing to protect it with my flesh!" ”
Ayn Rand opposed fascism, but was often openly critical of many of Roosevelt's policies.
Fears that the New Deal would end the Great Depression while leaving behind the legacy of too much state intervention in the economy.
Such a view, at the time, was somewhat ahead of its time. In the cultural world, Ayn Rand is different.
However, the "stagnation" of the 1970s partly suggests that some of Ayn Rand's views are not unfounded, and even insightful.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Ayn Rand, who had entered the middle age, had become popular in the United States and formed his own society. Iron fans of the society, who regarded Ayn Rand as a spiritual teacher, claimed to be her disciple.
Ayn Rand and his most trusted disciple, Brandon, are both mentors and lovers.
But Brandon fell in love with another of Rand's supporters.
When Brandon explained the truth to Rand, Rand could not accept it, and the two sides severed contact. Shortly thereafter, the Rand community also fell apart.
Ayn Rand took it upon himself to guard American freedom and had his own philosophical ideas and several literary works. But some of her practices can be called arbitrary, including not being able to tolerate disciples and fans, and challenging their own authority.
She is a person full of contradictions.
3. Atlas shrugged
Ayn Rand's masterpiece is the novel Atlas Shrugged.
The book fictionalizes a paradise made up of selfish and shrewd businessmen, scientists, artists, and other social elites.
Here, it is not morality but money that sustains everything, and money is regarded as an idol to be worshipped, a symbol of free exchange and fair justice, and each person is an independent creator and thinker.
But there are also many people who think that this world of drunkenness and gold fans and full of the copper smell of individualism is sinful and depraved.
One day, these selfish "wealth classes" went on strike and left en masse.
As a result, this land was taken over by the general public, and the system of "distributing according to the needs of each person is realized as much as possible".
At first, people rejoiced, thinking that this would make the best use of their talents;
But soon after, "grinding foreign workers" became the norm in society, and more and more jobs were not willing to be done.
Because lazy people can also eat and clothe under the mechanism of "unmatched on demand". And those who work in a down-to-earth manner, even if they create more wealth, in the face of the tax of "killing the rich and helping the poor", they will have little left.
A society that rejects capital, wealth, and selfishness is thus in trouble...
In this novel, Ayn Rand elaborated on his philosophy:
Free trade motivated by selfishness is the only way to create wealth.
On the contrary, those who advocate "the evil of money" are worth vigilance, because they are likely to try to steal public welfare under the guise of morality and for nothing.
One should not live for others, nor should one ask others to live for oneself. Striving to create one's own value, such a code of life, is better than all other moral high-profiles.
First published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged soon became a bestseller and was translated into multiple languages.
The values in it have been questioned and criticized a lot, but even those who oppose her cannot ignore her.
In his later years, Ayn Rand, opposed then-President Carter, supported candidate Reagan.
At the end of 1980, Reagan was elected president. At this time, Ayn Rand was speaking around, waving the flag for Reagan's "small government" policy.
In 1981, Ayn Rand felt unwell after a speech. When she got home, she couldn't afford to be sick.
At the beginning of the following year (1982), Ayn Rand died of illness at the age of 77.
Anand's other works, mainly including another novel, The Fountainhead, are also long-selling books that have survived to this day.