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Ayn Rand's philosophical ideas are needed today when American values are under fire Date published: 2/20/2005
IRVINE, Calif.--Born 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual's life on earth. She led a "rags-to-riches" life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence. The story of Rand's life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life": "a life more compelling than fiction." Born Feb. 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age 8, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child's ideals. A year later, she decided to become a writer: Inspired by the hero of a children's story, who embodied "intelligence directed to a practical purpose," she had a "blinding picture" of people--not as they are, but as they could be. In high school and college, she discovered two figures she never ceased to admire: Victor Hugo, for "the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness" of his stories, and Aristotle, as "the arch-realist and the advocate of the validity of man's mind." Escaping the tyranny and poverty of the U.S.S.R., she came to America in 1926, officially for a brief visit with relatives. A chance meeting with her favorite American director, Cecil B. DeMille, resulted in jobs as a movie extra and then a junior screenwriter. After periods of near-starvation, she sold her first play to Broadway and her first novel, "We the Living," set in the Soviet tyranny she had escaped. With her first best seller, "The Fountainhead" in 1943, she presented her ideal man, individualist architect Howard Roark. But it was, she said, "only an overture" to her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged" in 1957, a mystery story about the role of the mind in man's existence. With "Atlas Shrugged," her career as a fiction writer ended, but her career as a philosopher had just begun.
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