Andrew Bernstein - Ayn Rand For Beginners

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Text: 2009 Andrew Bernstein
Illustrations: 2009 Owen Brozman
Cover Art: 2009 Owen Brozman

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A For Beginners Documentary Comic Book
Copyright 2009

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eISBN: 978-1-934389-71-3

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Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905. Her real name was Alyssa Rosenbaum. At the age of six, she taught herself to read. At age nine, she decided that fiction writing would be her career. She was twelve years old in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution began, which resulted in the Communists taking over Russia a few years later. The victory of the Communists led to the confiscation of her fathers pharmacy and years of severe poverty for the Rosenbaum family.

In 1926, at the age of twenty-one, Ayn Rand escaped to the United States, the country that she loved. For approximately the first six months of her stay in America, she lived with relatives in Chicago. One of her relatives owned a movie theater there, which she visited almost daily. At this time, she worked on her English language skills by practicing the writing of screenplays. She lived in America for the rest of her life, until her death in 1982. In the United States, she changed her name to Ayn Rand, probably to protect her family, who still lived in Russia under the brutal dictator, Joseph Stalin.

Ayn Rand knew from her childhood that she wanted to write fiction, because she wanted to write stories about heroesabout strong men and women who overcame any and all obstacles to accomplish difficult goals very dear to them. Such stories would echo the trajectory of her own lifein which she came alone to a foreign country, with little knowledge of English and even less money, and overcame every challenge to become one of the great novelists in the English language.

Shortly after she arrived in America, she moved to Hollywood to pursue a screenwriting career. She rented a room at the Studio Club, which provided living quarters for young women seeking careers in the film business. (Later, Marilyn Monroe, among many other future stars, lived there.) On her second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille, one of the great film directors in movie history, spotted her at the gate of his studio and offered her a ride to the set of King of Kings, the biblical movie on which he was then working. Struck by this young woman with the intense, dark eyes, he gave the young Ayn Rand her first jobs in America, first as an extra and later as a script reader.

A week later, while working as an extra on the DeMille set, she met her future husband, Frank OConnor. The shy but determined Ayn Rand felt attracted to the handsome young actor, whom she later described as having an ideal face. During one scene, she made sure to place herself directly in his path so that he stumbled on her foot. He apologized, the ice was broken, and, as she put it years later, the rest is history. They were married in 1929 and remained so for fifty years, until Mr. OConnors death in 1979. Their marriage took place shortly before the final extension of her visa expired, and led to one of the proudest days of her lifewhen she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1931.

After DeMille closed his studio, Rand worked as a filing clerk in RKOs wardrobe department, becoming the department head within a year. At about this time, she bought her first portable typewriter and began her writing career. During her free time, she wrote screenplays and short stories, and began her first novel, We the Living, a semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman struggling to reach her personal goals under the Communists in the Soviet Union, which was eventually published in 1936. Before the novels publication, she sold a screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios for a modest sum that was sufficient for her to quit the wardrobe department and concentrate on full-time writing.

During the 1930s, she authored a courtroom drama, which ran on Broadway for more than six months, entitled Night of January 16th. The plays most striking feature was that the jury was composed of volunteers from the audienceso that the story had two different endings depending on the jurys verdict.

During this period, she also wrote her novella, Anthem, which is generally considered her first work of great fiction. It has sold several million copies, and is widely read today in American high schools. Anthem tells the story of an independent young mind in a Communist-style totalitarian state of the future, where all freedom of thought and expression has been abolished. Even the language has been thoroughly collectivized: all first-person singular pronouns have been expunged; men are executed for discovering and speaking the Unmentionable WordI; and individuals think and speak of themselves exclusively as we. The suppression of individual thought has plunged the society into a second dark age. The storys hero, Equality 7-2521, a Thomas Edison of his generation, reinvents the electric light. His gravest sin, however, is that he dares to think, act, and stand alone against the all-powerful statecrimes for which he is condemned to death. The story presents a powerful case for the freedom and rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the totalitarian state.

Anthem was published in England in 1938, but was not published in the United States until after World War II, in 1946. Ayn Rand subsequently claimed that intellectual opposition among American publishers to its pro-individualist, anti-collectivist theme was the main reason it was not published in the United States until after World War II.

In the late 1930s, Ayn Rand began writing the book that would establish her literary reputation and bring her popular fame: The Fountainhead. It tells the story of a principled and brilliant young architect who struggles against virtually all of societyincluding the woman he lovesto build structures in accordance with his own vision and ideals. The hero, Howard Roark, who refuses to sell his soul in any form, has become an inspiration to countless readers over the nearly seven decades since its first publication.