Ayn Rand : biography
By this time she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, possibly as a Cyrillic contraction of her birth surname,; and she adopted the first name Ayn, either from a Finnish name or from the Hebrew word (ayin, meaning "eye").Rand said the origin of Ayn was Finnish , but some biographical sources question this, suggesting it may come from a Hebrew nickname. provides a detailed discussion.
Arrival in America
In 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit American relatives. She was so impressed with the skyline of Manhattan upon her arrival in New York Harbor that she cried what she later called "tears of splendor". Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with relatives in Chicago, one of whom owned a movie theater and allowed her to watch dozens of films for free. She then set out for Hollywood, California.
Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic living expenses. A chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to a job as an extra in his film The King of Kings as well as subsequent work as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met an aspiring young actor, Frank O’Connor; the two were married on April 15, 1929. Rand became an American citizen in 1931. Taking various jobs during the 1930s to support her writing, she worked for a time as the head of the costume department at RKO Studios.; She made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to acquire permission to emigrate.;
Early fiction
Rand’s first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932, although it was never produced. This was followed by the courtroom drama Night of January 16th, first produced by E.E. Clive in Hollywood in 1934 and then successfully reopened on Broadway in 1935. Each night the "jury" was selected from members of the audience, and one of the two different endings, depending on the jury’s "verdict", would then be performed. In 1941, Paramount Pictures produced a movie version of the play. Rand did not participate in the production and was highly critical of the result.;
Rand’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living, was published in 1936. Set in Soviet Russia, it focused on the struggle between the individual and the state. In a 1959 foreword to the novel, Rand stated that We the Living "is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual sense. The plot is invented, the background is not…" Initial sales were slow and the American publisher let it go out of print, although European editions continued to sell.Ralston, Richard E. "Publishing We the Living". In After the success of her later novels, Rand was able to release a revised version in 1959 that has since sold over three million copies.Ralston, Richard E. "Publishing We the Living". In Without Rand’s knowledge or permission, the novel was made into a pair of Italian films, Noi vivi and Addio, Kira, in 1942. Rediscovered in the 1960s, these films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand and re-released as We the Living in 1986.
Her novella Anthem was written during a break from the writing of her next major novel, The Fountainhead. It presents a vision of a dystopian future world in which totalitarian collectivism has triumphed to such an extent that even the word ‘I’ has been forgotten and replaced with ‘we’.; It was published in England in 1938, but Rand initially could not find an American publisher. As with We the Living, Rand’s later success allowed her to get a revised version published in 1946, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies.Ralston, Richard E. "Publishing Anthem". In
