|
Home
Word of the Day
Archives
Clever
Clue of the Month
The
Cruciverbalist
Links
Daily
Email
|
|
AYN (eyn)
Russian
born American philosopher and novelist
Common
clue: "Atlas
Shrugged" author Rand; Author Rand of "The
Fountainhead"; First name in objectivism
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
3 times a year
News:
Ayn
Rand's Atlas Shrugged and the Obama Economy
Video:
Ayn
Rand – Objectivism vs Altruism
Ayn
Rand (February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982), born Alissa
"Alice" Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was a popular and
controversial American philosopher and novelist, best known for
her philosophy of Objectivism and her novels The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy and her fiction both emphasize,
above all, her concepts of individualism, egoism, "rational
self-interest", and capitalism. Her novels were based upon
the archetype of the Randian hero, a man whose ability and
independence leads others to reject him, but who perseveres
nevertheless to achieve his values. Rand viewed this hero as the
ideal and made it the express goal of her literature to showcase
such heroes. She believed:
1.
That man must choose his values and actions by reason;
2.
That the individual has a right to exist for his own sake,
neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and
3.
That no one has the right to seek values from others by physical
force, or impose ideas on others by physical force.
Rand
was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and was the eldest of three
daughters of a Jewish family. She studied philosophy and history
at the University of Petrograd. There she took classes with the
political theorist Professor Losky, and it was at this time that
she first became attracted to Nietzschean views. She then entered
the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study
screenwriting; in late 1925, however, she was granted a visa to
visit American relatives. She arrived in the United States in
February 1926, at the age of twenty-one. After a brief stay with
her relatives in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the
Soviet Union, and set out for Los Angeles to become a
screenwriter. She then changed her name to "Ayn Rand",
partly to avoid Soviet retaliation against her family for her
political views (she assumed her name would appear in the credits
of films with an anti-Communist message, attracting the attention
of Soviet officials). There is a story told that she named
herself after the Remington Rand typewriter, but recent evidence
has proved that this is not the case. In Barbara Branden's The
Passion of Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand's first name is said to have come
from the name of a Finnish writer whom she had not read, but
whose name she liked and adopted. The book also has a quotation
from Ayn's cousin in which she claims to have been present when
Ayn chose the name Rand from a typewriter.
Rand
published the book described as her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged,
in 1957. This book, just as The Fountainhead had, became a
bestseller. Atlas Shrugged is often seen as Rand's most complete
statement of Objectivist philosophy in any of her works of
fiction. Along with Nathaniel Branden and his wife Barbara, as
well as a handful of others including Alan Greenspan and Leonard
Peikoff (jokingly designated "The Collective"), Rand
launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy.
Rand's
political views were radically anti-communist, anti-statist, and
pro-capitalist. Her writings praised above all the human
individual and the creative genius of which one is capable. She
exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of egoism and
individualism. Rand also had a strong dislike for mysticism,
religion, and compulsory charity, all of which she believed
helped foster a crippling culture of resentment towards
individual human happiness, flourishment, and success.
In
1947, during the infamous Red Scare, Rand testified as a
"friendly witness" before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities. Rand's testimony involved analysis of the
1943 film Song of Russia. Rand argued that the movie grossly
misrepresented the socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union.
She told the committee that the film presented life in the USSR
as being much better than it actually was. Apparently this 1943
film was intentional wartime propaganda by U.S. patriots, trying
to put their Soviet allies in World War II under the best
possible light. After the HUAC hearings, when Ayn Rand was asked
about her feelings on the effectiveness of their investigations,
she described the process as "futile."
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Ayn Rand".
|
|
|