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Museum of Work
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The Museum of Work ("Arbetets museum") is a museum located in Norrköping, Sweden. The museum is located in the "Strykjärn" (Clothes iron), a former weaving mill in the old industrial area on the Motala ström river in the city centre of Norrköping. The former textile factory Holmens Bruk operated in the building from 1917 to 1962.
The museum documents work and everyday life by collecting personal stories about people's professional lives from both the past and the present. The museum's archive contain material from memory collections and documentation projects.
Since 2009, the museum also houses the EWK — Center for Political Illustration Art, which is based on work of the satirist Ewert Karlsson (1918 — 2004). For decades he was frequently published in the Swedish tabloid, "Aftonbladet".
Overview.
The museum is a national central museum with the task of preserving and telling about work and everyday life. It has, among other things, exhibitions on the terms and conditions of the work and the history of the industrial society. The museum is also known to highlight gender perspective in their exhibitions.
The work museum documents work and everyday life by collecting personal stories, including people's professional life from both the past and present. In the museum's archive, there is a rich material of memory collections and documentation projects — over 2600 interviews, stories and photodocumentations have been collected since the museum opened.
The museum is also a support for the country's approximately 1,500 working life museums that are old workplaces preserved to convey their history.
Exhibitions.
The Museum of Work shows exhibitions going on over several years, but also shorter exhibitions — including several photo exhibitions on themes that can be linked to work and everyday life.
The history of Alva.
The history of Alva Karlsson is the only exhibition in the museum that is permanent. The exhibition connects to the museum's building and its history as part of the textile industry in Norrköping. Alva worked as a rollers between the years 1927 — 1962.
Industriland.
One of the museum long-term exhibitions is Industriland — when Sweden became modern, the exhibition was in 2007 — 2013 and consisted of an ongoing bond with various objects that were somehow significant both for working life and everyday during the period 1930 — 1980. The exhibition also consisted of presentations of the working life museums in Sweden and a number of rooms with themes such as: leisure, world, living and consumption.
Framtidsland (Future country).
In 2014, the exhibition was inaugurated that takes by where Industriland ends: Future country. It is an exhibition that investigates what a sustainable society is will be part of the museum's exhibitions until 2019. The exhibition consists of materials that are designed based on conversations between young people and researchers around Sweden. The exhibition addresses themes such as work, environment and everyday life. A tour version of the exhibition is given in the locations Falun, Kristianstad and Örebro.
The history of Alva.
The history of Alva Karlsson is the only exhibition in the museum that is permanent. The exhibition connects to the museum's building and its history as part of the textile industry in Norrköping. Alva worked as a rollers between the years 1927 — 1962.
Industriland.
One of the museum long-term exhibitions is Industriland — when Sweden became modern, the exhibition was in 2007 — 2013 and consisted of an ongoing bond with various objects that were somehow significant both for working life and everyday during the period 1930 — 1980. The exhibition also consisted of presentations of the working life museums in Sweden and a number of rooms with themes such as: leisure, world, living and consumption.
Framtidsland (Future country).
In 2014, the exhibition was inaugurated that takes by where Industriland ends: Future country. It is an exhibition that investigates what a sustainable society is will be part of the museum's exhibitions until 2019. The exhibition consists of materials that are designed based on conversations between young people and researchers around Sweden. The exhibition addresses themes such as work, environment and everyday life. A tour version of the exhibition is given in the locations Falun, Kristianstad and Örebro.
EWK — The Center for Political Illustration Art.
Since 2009, the Museum also houses EWK — center for political illustration art. The museum preserves, develops and conveys the political illustrator Ewert Karlsson's production. The museum also holds theme exhibitions with national and international political illustrators with the aim of highlighting and strengthening the political art.
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Alp Arslan
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Alp Arslan was the second Sultan of the Seljuk Empire and great-grandson of Seljuk, the eponymous founder of the dynasty. He greatly expanded the Seljuk territory and consolidated his power, defeating rivals to the south and northwest, and his victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, in 1071, ushered in the Turkoman settlement of Anatolia. For his military prowess and fighting skills, he obtained the name "Alp Arslan", which means "Heroic Lion" in Turkish.
Early life.
Alp Arslan was the son of Chaghri and nephew of Tughril, the founding Sultans of the Seljuk Empire. His grandfather was Mikail, who in turn was the son of the warlord Seljuk. He was the father of numerous children, including Malik-Shah I and Tutush I. It is unclear who the mother or mothers of his children were. He was known to have been married at least twice. His wives included the widow of his uncle Tughril, a Kara-Khanid princess known as Aka Khatun, and the daughter or niece of Bagrat IV of Georgia (who would later marry his vizier, Nizam al-Mulk). One of Seljuk's other sons was the Turkic chieftain Arslan Isra'il, whose son, Kutalmish, contested his nephew's succession to the sultanate. Alp Arslan's younger brothers Suleiman ibn Chaghri and Qavurt were his rivals. Kilij Arslan, the son and successor of Suleiman ibn Kutalmish (Kutalmish's son, who would later become Sultan of Rûm), was a major opponent of the Franks during the First Crusade and the Crusade of 1101.
Early career.
Alp Arslan accompanied his uncle Tughril on campaigns in the south against the Fatimids while his father Chaghri remained in Khorasan. Upon Alp Arslan's return to Khorasan, he began his work in administration at his father's suggestion. While there, his father introduced him to Nizam al-Mulk, one of the most eminent statesmen in early Muslim history and Alp Arslan's future vizier.
After the death of his father, Alp Arslan succeeded him as governor of Khorasan in 1059. His uncle Tughril died in 1063 and had designated his successor as Suleiman, Arslan's infant brother. Arslan and his uncle Kutalmish both contested this succession which was resolved at the battle of Damghan in 1063. Arslan defeated Kutalmish for the throne and succeeded on 27 April 1064 as sultan of the Seljuk Empire, thus becoming sole monarch of Persia from the river Oxus to the Tigris. In 1064 he led a campaign in Georgia during which he captured the regions between Tbilisi and the Çoruh river, Akhalkalaki and Alaverdi. Bagrat IV submitted to paying jizya to the Seljuks but the Georgians broke the agreement in 1065. Alp Arslan invaded Georgia again in 1068. He captured Tbilisi after a short battle and obtained the submission of Bagrat IV; however, the Georgians freed themselves from Seljuk rule around 1073–1074.
In consolidating his empire and subduing contending factions, Arslan was ably assisted by Nizam al-Mulk, and the two are credited with helping to stabilize the empire after the death of Tughril. With peace and security established in his dominions, Arslan convoked an assembly of the states and in 1066, he declared his son Malik Shah I his heir and successor. With the hope of capturing Caesarea Mazaca, the capital of Cappadocia, he placed himself at the head of the Turkoman cavalry, crossed the Euphrates, and entered and invaded the city. Along with Nizam al-Mulk, he then marched into Armenia and Georgia, which he conquered in 1064. After a siege of 25 days, the Seljuks captured Ani, the capital city of Armenia. An account of the sack and massacres in Ani is given by the historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, who quotes an eyewitness saying:
Byzantine struggle.
In route to fight the Fatimids in Syria in 1068, Alp Arslan invaded the Byzantine Empire. The Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes, assuming command in person, met the invaders in Cilicia. In three arduous campaigns, the Turks were defeated in detail and driven across the Euphrates in 1070. The first two campaigns were conducted by the emperor himself, while the third was directed by Manuel Comnenos, great-uncle of Emperor Manuel Comnenos. During this time, Arslan gained the allegiance of Rashid al-Dawla Mahmud, the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo.
In 1071, Romanos again took the field and advanced into Armenia with possibly 30,000 men, including a contingent of Cuman Turks as well as contingents of Franks and Normans, under Ursel de Baieul. Alp Arslan, who had moved his troops south to fight the Fatimids, quickly reversed to meet the Byzantines. At Manzikert, on the Murat River, north of Lake Van, the two forces waged the Battle of Manzikert. The Cuman mercenaries among the Byzantine forces immediately defected to the Turkic side. Seeing this, "the Western mercenaries rode off and took no part in the battle." To be exact, Romanos was betrayed by general Andronikos Doukas, son of the Caesar (Romanos's stepson), who pronounced him dead and rode off with a large part of the Byzantine forces at a critical moment. The Byzantines were totally routed.
Emperor Romanos IV was himself taken prisoner and conducted into the presence of Alp Arslan. After a ritual humiliation, Arslan treated him with generosity. After peace terms were agreed to, Arslan dismissed the Emperor, loaded with presents and respectfully attended by a military guard.
Alp Arslan's victories changed the balance in near Asia completely in favour of the Seljuq Turks and Sunni Muslims. While the Byzantine Empire was to continue for nearly four more centuries, the victory at Manzikert signalled the beginning of Turkmen ascendancy in Anatolia. The victory at Manzikert became so popular among the Turks that later every noble family in Anatolia claimed to have had an ancestor who had fought on that day.
State organization.
Alp Arslan's strength lay in the military realm. Domestic affairs were handled by his able vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, the founder of the administrative organization that characterized and strengthened the sultanate during the reigns of Alp Arslan and his son, Malik Shah. Military fiefs, governed by Seljuq princes, were established to provide support for the soldiery and to accommodate the nomadic Turks to the established Anatolian agricultural scene. This type of military fiefdom enabled the nomadic Turks to draw on the resources of the sedentary Persians, Turks, and other established cultures within the Seljuq realm, and allowed Alp Arslan to field a huge standing army without depending on tribute from conquest to pay his soldiers. He not only had enough food from his subjects to maintain his military, but the taxes collected from traders and merchants added to his coffers sufficiently to fund his continuous wars.
Suleiman ibn Qutalmish was the son of the contender for Arslan's throne; he was appointed governor of the north-western provinces and assigned to completing the invasion of Anatolia. An explanation for this choice can only be conjectured from Ibn al-Athir's account of the battle between Alp-Arslan and Kutalmish, in which he writes that Alp-Arslan wept for the latter's death and greatly mourned the loss of his kinsman.
Death.
After Manzikert, the dominion of Alp Arslan extended over much of western Asia. He soon prepared to march for the conquest of Turkestan, the original seat of his ancestors. With a powerful army he advanced to the banks of the Oxus. Before he could pass the river with safety, however, it was necessary to subdue certain fortresses, one of which was for several days vigorously defended by the rebel, Yusuf al-Kharezmi or Yusuf al-Harani. Perhaps over-eager to press on against his Qarakhanid enemy, Alp Arslan gained the governor's submission by promising the rebel 'perpetual ownership of his lands'. When Yusuf al-Harani was brought before him, the Sultan ordered that he be shot, but before the archers could raise their bows Yusuf seized a knife and threw himself at Alp Arslan, striking three blows before being slain. Four days later on 24 November 1072, Alp Arslan died and was buried at Merv, having designated his 18-year-old son Malik Shah as his successor.
Family.
One of his wives was Safariyya Khatun. She had a daughter, Sifri Khatun, who in 1071–72, married Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadi. Safariyya died in Isfahan in 1073–4. Another of his wives was Akka Khatun. She had been formerly the wife of Sultan Tughril. Alp Arslan married her after Tughril's death in 1063. Another of his wives was Shah Khatun. She was the daughter of Qadir Khan Yusuf, and had been formerly married to Ghaznavid Mas'ud. Another of his wives was the daughter of the Georgian king Bagrat. They married in 1067–68. He divorced her soon after, and married her to Fadlun. His sons were Malik-Shah I, Tutush I, Tekish and Arslan Arghun. One of his daughters married the son of Kurd Surkhab, son of Bard in 1068. Another daughter, Zulaikha Khatun, was married to Muslim, son of Quraish in 1086–7. Another daughter, Aisha Khatun, married Shams al-Mulk Nasr, son of Ibrahim Khan Tamghach.
Legacy.
Alp Arslan's conquest of Anatolia from the Byzantines is also seen as one of the pivotal precursors to the launch of the Crusades.
From 2002 to July 2008 under Turkmen calendar reform, the month of August was named after Alp Arslan.
The 2nd Training Motorized Rifle Division of the Turkmen Ground Forces is named in his honour.
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American Film Institute
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The American Film Institute (AFI) is an American nonprofit film organization that educates filmmakers and honors the heritage of the motion picture arts in the United States. AFI is supported by private funding and public membership fees.
Leadership.
The institute is composed of leaders from the film, entertainment, business, and academic communities. The board of trustees is chaired by Kathleen Kennedy and the board of directors chaired by Robert A. Daly guide the organization, which is led by President and CEO, film historian Bob Gazzale. Prior leaders were founding director George Stevens Jr. (from the organization's inception in 1967 until 1980) and Jean Picker Firstenberg (from 1980 to 2007).
History.
The American Film Institute was founded by a 1965 presidential mandate announced in the Rose Garden of the White House by Lyndon B. Johnson—to establish a national arts organization to preserve the legacy of American film heritage, educate the next generation of filmmakers, and honor the artists and their work. Two years later, in 1967, AFI was established, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Ford Foundation.
The original 22-member Board of Trustees included actor Gregory Peck as chairman and actor Sidney Poitier as vice-chairman, as well as director Francis Ford Coppola, film historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., lobbyist Jack Valenti, and other representatives from the arts and academia.
The institute established a training program for filmmakers known then as the Center for Advanced Film Studies. Also created in the early years were a repertory film exhibition program at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the AFI Catalog of Feature Films — a scholarly source for American film history. The institute moved to its current eight-acre Hollywood campus in 1981. The film training program grew into the AFI Conservatory, an accredited graduate school.
AFI moved its presentation of first-run and auteur films from the Kennedy Center to the historic AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, which hosts the AFI DOCS film festival, making AFI the largest nonprofit film exhibitor in the world. AFI educates audiences and recognizes artistic excellence through its awards programs and 10 Top 10 Lists.
List of programs in brief.
AFI educational and cultural programs include:
AFI Conservatory.
In 1969, the institute established the AFI Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies at Greystone, the Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills, California. The first class included filmmakers Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, and Paul Schrader. That program grew into the AFI Conservatory, an accredited graduate film school located in the hills above Hollywood, California, providing training in six filmmaking disciplines: cinematography, directing, editing, producing, production design, and screenwriting. Mirroring a professional production environment, Fellows collaborate to make more films than any other graduate level program. Admission to AFI Conservatory is highly selective, with a maximum of 140 graduates per year.
In 2013, Emmy and Oscar-winning director, producer, and screenwriter James L. Brooks ("As Good as It Gets", "Broadcast News", "Terms of Endearment") joined as the artistic director of the AFI Conservatory where he provides leadership for the film program. Brooks' artistic role at the AFI Conservatory has a rich legacy that includes Daniel Petrie, Jr., Robert Wise, and Frank Pierson. Award-winning director Bob Mandel served as dean of the AFI Conservatory for nine years. Jan Schuette took over as dean in 2014 and served until 2017. Film producer Richard Gladstein was dean from 2017 until 2019, when Susan Ruskin was appointed.
Notable alumni.
AFI Conservatory's alumni have careers in film, television and on the web. They have been recognized with all of the major industry awards—Academy Award, Emmy Award, guild awards, and the Tony Award.
Among the alumni of AFI are Andrea Arnold ("Red Road", "Fish Tank"), Darren Aronofsky ("Requiem for a Dream", "Black Swan"), Carl Colpaert ("Gas Food Lodging", "Hurlyburly", "Swimming with Sharks"), Doug Ellin ("Entourage"), Todd Field ("In the Bedroom", "Little Children"), Jack Fisk ("Badlands", "Days of Heaven", "There Will Be Blood"), Carl Franklin ("One False Move", "Devil in a Blue Dress", "House of Cards"), Patty Jenkins ("Monster", "Wonder Woman"), Janusz Kamiński ("Lincoln", "Schindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan"), Matthew Libatique ("Noah", "Black Swan"), David Lynch ("Mulholland Drive", "Blue Velvet"), Terrence Malick ("Days of Heaven", "The Thin Red Line", "The Tree of Life"), Melina Matsoukas (Queen and Slim), Rachel Morrison (Black Panther, Fruitvale Station), Victor Nuñez, ("Ruby in Paradise", "Ulee's Gold"), Wally Pfister ("Memento", "The Dark Knight", "Inception"), Robert Richardson ("Platoon"), Ari Aster ("Hereditary", "Midsommar"), and many others.
Notable alumni.
AFI Conservatory's alumni have careers in film, television and on the web. They have been recognized with all of the major industry awards—Academy Award, Emmy Award, guild awards, and the Tony Award.
Among the alumni of AFI are Andrea Arnold ("Red Road", "Fish Tank"), Darren Aronofsky ("Requiem for a Dream", "Black Swan"), Carl Colpaert ("Gas Food Lodging", "Hurlyburly", "Swimming with Sharks"), Doug Ellin ("Entourage"), Todd Field ("In the Bedroom", "Little Children"), Jack Fisk ("Badlands", "Days of Heaven", "There Will Be Blood"), Carl Franklin ("One False Move", "Devil in a Blue Dress", "House of Cards"), Patty Jenkins ("Monster", "Wonder Woman"), Janusz Kamiński ("Lincoln", "Schindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan"), Matthew Libatique ("Noah", "Black Swan"), David Lynch ("Mulholland Drive", "Blue Velvet"), Terrence Malick ("Days of Heaven", "The Thin Red Line", "The Tree of Life"), Melina Matsoukas (Queen and Slim), Rachel Morrison (Black Panther, Fruitvale Station), Victor Nuñez, ("Ruby in Paradise", "Ulee's Gold"), Wally Pfister ("Memento", "The Dark Knight", "Inception"), Robert Richardson ("Platoon"), Ari Aster ("Hereditary", "Midsommar"), and many others.
AFI programs.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films.
The AFI Catalog, started in 1968, is a web-based filmographic database. A research tool for film historians, the catalog consists of entries on more than 60,000 feature films and 17,000 short films produced from 1893 to 2011, as well as AFI Awards Outstanding Movies of the Year from 2000 through 2010. Early print copies of this catalog may also be found at local libraries.
AFI Awards.
Created in 2000, the AFI Awards honor the ten outstanding films ("Movies of the Year") and ten outstanding television programs ("TV Programs of the Year"). The awards are a non-competitive acknowledgment of excellence.
The awards are announced in December, and a private luncheon for award honorees takes place the following January.
AFI 100 Years... series.
The AFI 100 Years... series, which ran from 1998 to 2008 and created jury-selected lists of America's best movies in categories such as Musicals, Laughs and Thrills, prompted new generations to experience classic American films. The juries consisted of over 1,500 artists, scholars, critics, and historians. "Citizen Kane" was voted the greatest American film twice.
AFI film festivals.
AFI operates two film festivals: AFI Fest in Los Angeles, and AFI Docs (formally known as Silverdocs) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
AFI Fest.
AFI Fest is the American Film Institute's annual celebration of artistic excellence. It is a showcase for the best festival films of the year and an opportunity for master filmmakers and emerging artists to come together with audiences in the movie capital of the world. It is the only festival of its stature that is free to the public. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognizes AFI Fest as a qualifying festival for the Short Films category for the annual Academy Awards.
The festival has paid tribute to numerous influential filmmakers and artists over the years, including Agnès Varda, Pedro Almodóvar and David Lynch as guest artistic directors, and has screened scores of films that have produced Oscar nominations and wins.
AFI Docs.
Held annually in June, AFI Docs (formerly Silverdocs) is a documentary festival in Washington, D.C. The festival attracts over 27,000 documentary enthusiasts.
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is a moving image exhibition, education and cultural center located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Anchored by the restoration of noted architect John Eberson's historic 1938 Silver Theatre, it features 32,000 square feet of new construction housing two stadium theatres, office and meeting space, and reception and exhibit areas.
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center presents film and video programming, augmented by filmmaker interviews, panels, discussions, and musical performances.
The AFI Directing Workshop for Women.
The Directing Workshop for Women is a training program committed to educating and mentoring participants in an effort to increase the number of women working professionally in screen directing. In this tuition-free program, each participant is required to complete a short film by the end of the year-long program.
Alumnae of the program include Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Dyan Cannon, Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Getzinger, Lesli Linka Glatter, Lily Tomlin, Susan Oliver and Nancy Malone.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films.
The AFI Catalog, started in 1968, is a web-based filmographic database. A research tool for film historians, the catalog consists of entries on more than 60,000 feature films and 17,000 short films produced from 1893 to 2011, as well as AFI Awards Outstanding Movies of the Year from 2000 through 2010. Early print copies of this catalog may also be found at local libraries.
AFI Awards.
Created in 2000, the AFI Awards honor the ten outstanding films ("Movies of the Year") and ten outstanding television programs ("TV Programs of the Year"). The awards are a non-competitive acknowledgment of excellence.
The awards are announced in December, and a private luncheon for award honorees takes place the following January.
AFI 100 Years... series.
The AFI 100 Years... series, which ran from 1998 to 2008 and created jury-selected lists of America's best movies in categories such as Musicals, Laughs and Thrills, prompted new generations to experience classic American films. The juries consisted of over 1,500 artists, scholars, critics, and historians. "Citizen Kane" was voted the greatest American film twice.
AFI film festivals.
AFI operates two film festivals: AFI Fest in Los Angeles, and AFI Docs (formally known as Silverdocs) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
AFI Fest.
AFI Fest is the American Film Institute's annual celebration of artistic excellence. It is a showcase for the best festival films of the year and an opportunity for master filmmakers and emerging artists to come together with audiences in the movie capital of the world. It is the only festival of its stature that is free to the public. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognizes AFI Fest as a qualifying festival for the Short Films category for the annual Academy Awards.
The festival has paid tribute to numerous influential filmmakers and artists over the years, including Agnès Varda, Pedro Almodóvar and David Lynch as guest artistic directors, and has screened scores of films that have produced Oscar nominations and wins.
AFI Docs.
Held annually in June, AFI Docs (formerly Silverdocs) is a documentary festival in Washington, D.C. The festival attracts over 27,000 documentary enthusiasts.
AFI Fest.
AFI Fest is the American Film Institute's annual celebration of artistic excellence. It is a showcase for the best festival films of the year and an opportunity for master filmmakers and emerging artists to come together with audiences in the movie capital of the world. It is the only festival of its stature that is free to the public. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognizes AFI Fest as a qualifying festival for the Short Films category for the annual Academy Awards.
The festival has paid tribute to numerous influential filmmakers and artists over the years, including Agnès Varda, Pedro Almodóvar and David Lynch as guest artistic directors, and has screened scores of films that have produced Oscar nominations and wins.
AFI Docs.
Held annually in June, AFI Docs (formerly Silverdocs) is a documentary festival in Washington, D.C. The festival attracts over 27,000 documentary enthusiasts.
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is a moving image exhibition, education and cultural center located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Anchored by the restoration of noted architect John Eberson's historic 1938 Silver Theatre, it features 32,000 square feet of new construction housing two stadium theatres, office and meeting space, and reception and exhibit areas.
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center presents film and video programming, augmented by filmmaker interviews, panels, discussions, and musical performances.
The AFI Directing Workshop for Women.
The Directing Workshop for Women is a training program committed to educating and mentoring participants in an effort to increase the number of women working professionally in screen directing. In this tuition-free program, each participant is required to complete a short film by the end of the year-long program.
Alumnae of the program include Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Dyan Cannon, Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Getzinger, Lesli Linka Glatter, Lily Tomlin, Susan Oliver and Nancy Malone.
AFI Directors Series.
AFI released a set of hour-long programs reviewing the career of acclaimed directors. The Directors Series content was copyrighted in 1997 by Media Entertainment Inc and The American Film Institute, and the VHS and DVDs were released between 1999 and 2001 on Winstar TV and Video.
Directors featured included:
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Aldous Huxley
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Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books, both novels and non-fiction works, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine "Oxford Poetry", before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects with works such as "The Perennial Philosophy" (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and "The Doors of Perception" (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel "Brave New World" (1932) and his final novel "Island" (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
Early life.
Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley, who edited "The Cornhill Magazine", and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Julia named him Aldous after a character in one of her sister's novels. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic, and controversialist whom had often been called "Darwin's Bulldog". His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who took his own life after a period of clinical depression.
As a child, Huxley's nickname was "Ogie", short for "Ogre". He was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently "[contemplated] the strangeness of things". According to his cousin and contemporary Gervas Huxley, he had an early interest in drawing.
Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming. He was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside he went on to Eton College. His mother died in 1908, when he was 14 (his father later remarried). He contracted the eye disease Keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years". This "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor". In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited "Oxford Poetry" in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote:
Following his years at Balliol, Huxley, being financially indebted to his father, decided to find employment. He taught French for a year at Eton College, where Eric Blair (who was to take the pen name George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils. He was mainly remembered as being an incompetent schoolmaster unable to keep order in class. Nevertheless, Blair and others spoke highly of his excellent command of language.
Huxley also worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England. According to an introduction to his science fiction novel "Brave New World" (1932), the experience he had there of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was an important source for the novel.
Career.
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a successful writer and social satirist. His first published novels were social satires, "Crome Yellow" (1921), "Antic Hay" (1923), "Those Barren Leaves" (1925), and "Point Counter Point" (1928). "Brave New World" (1932) was his fifth novel and first dystopian work. In the 1920s, he was also a contributor to "Vanity Fair" and British "Vogue" magazines.
Contact with the Bloomsbury Set.
During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. While at the Manor, he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. Later, in "Crome Yellow" (1921), he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919, John Middleton Murry was reorganising the "Athenaeum" and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys (1899–1955), also at Garsington. They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1932). Very early in 1929, in London, Huxley met Gerald Heard, a writer and broadcaster, philosopher and interpreter of contemporary science.
Works of this period included novels about the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, (his magnum opus "Brave New World"), and on pacifist themes ("Eyeless in Gaza"). In "Brave New World", set in a dystopian London, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander, on whom he based a character in "Eyeless in Gaza".
During this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including "Ends and Means" (1937), "An Encyclopedia of Pacifism", and "Pacifism and Philosophy", and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.
Life in the United States.
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Huxley, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly southern California,<ref name="google/books=3cvYCwAAQBAJ"></ref> until his death, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote "Ends and Means" (1937). The book contains tracts on war, religion, nationalism, and ethics.
Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti entered into an enduring exchange (sometimes edging on debate) over many years, with Krishnamurti representing the more rarefied, detached, ivory-tower perspective and Huxley, with his pragmatic concerns, the more socially and historically informed position. Huxley wrote a foreword to Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, "The First and Last Freedom" (1954).
Huxley became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to them. Not long afterwards, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, "The Perennial Philosophy", which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.
Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College. He spent much time at the college in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel "After Many a Summer" (1939). The novel won Huxley a British literary award, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period, Huxley earned a substantial income as a Hollywood screenwriter; Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography "My Guru and His Disciple", states that Huxley earned more than $3,000 per week (approximately $50,000 in 2020 dollars) as a screenwriter, and that he used much of it to transport Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. In March 1938, Huxley's friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which hired him for "Madame Curie" which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (Eventually, the film was completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for "Pride and Prejudice" (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including "Jane Eyre" (1944). He was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll. The script was not used, however.
Huxley wrote an introduction to the posthumous publication of J. D. Unwin's 1940 book "Hopousia or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society".
On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter, he predicted:
In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship and presented themselves for examination. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S. and would not state that his objections were based on religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under the McCarran Act, the judge had to adjourn the proceedings. He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In 1959, Huxley turned down an offer to be made a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government without giving a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958, while his brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974.
In the fall semester of 1960 Huxley was invited by Professor Huston Smith to be the Carnegie Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of the MIT centennial program of events organised by the Department of Humanities, Huxley presented a series of lectures titled, "What a Piece of Work is a Man" which concerned history, language, and art.
Robert S. de Ropp (scientist, humanitarian, and author), who had spent time with Huxley in England in the 1930s, connected with him again in the U.S. in the early 1960s and wrote that “the enormous intellect, the beautifully modulated voice, the gentle objectivity, all were unchanged. He was one of the most highly civilized human beings I had ever met.”
Contact with the Bloomsbury Set.
During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. While at the Manor, he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. Later, in "Crome Yellow" (1921), he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919, John Middleton Murry was reorganising the "Athenaeum" and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys (1899–1955), also at Garsington. They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1932). Very early in 1929, in London, Huxley met Gerald Heard, a writer and broadcaster, philosopher and interpreter of contemporary science.
Works of this period included novels about the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, (his magnum opus "Brave New World"), and on pacifist themes ("Eyeless in Gaza"). In "Brave New World", set in a dystopian London, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander, on whom he based a character in "Eyeless in Gaza".
During this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including "Ends and Means" (1937), "An Encyclopedia of Pacifism", and "Pacifism and Philosophy", and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.
Life in the United States.
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Huxley, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly southern California,<ref name="google/books=3cvYCwAAQBAJ"></ref> until his death, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote "Ends and Means" (1937). The book contains tracts on war, religion, nationalism, and ethics.
Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti entered into an enduring exchange (sometimes edging on debate) over many years, with Krishnamurti representing the more rarefied, detached, ivory-tower perspective and Huxley, with his pragmatic concerns, the more socially and historically informed position. Huxley wrote a foreword to Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, "The First and Last Freedom" (1954).
Huxley became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to them. Not long afterwards, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, "The Perennial Philosophy", which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.
Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College. He spent much time at the college in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel "After Many a Summer" (1939). The novel won Huxley a British literary award, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period, Huxley earned a substantial income as a Hollywood screenwriter; Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography "My Guru and His Disciple", states that Huxley earned more than $3,000 per week (approximately $50,000 in 2020 dollars) as a screenwriter, and that he used much of it to transport Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. In March 1938, Huxley's friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which hired him for "Madame Curie" which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (Eventually, the film was completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for "Pride and Prejudice" (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including "Jane Eyre" (1944). He was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll. The script was not used, however.
Huxley wrote an introduction to the posthumous publication of J. D. Unwin's 1940 book "Hopousia or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society".
On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter, he predicted:
In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship and presented themselves for examination. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S. and would not state that his objections were based on religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under the McCarran Act, the judge had to adjourn the proceedings. He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In 1959, Huxley turned down an offer to be made a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government without giving a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958, while his brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974.
In the fall semester of 1960 Huxley was invited by Professor Huston Smith to be the Carnegie Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of the MIT centennial program of events organised by the Department of Humanities, Huxley presented a series of lectures titled, "What a Piece of Work is a Man" which concerned history, language, and art.
Robert S. de Ropp (scientist, humanitarian, and author), who had spent time with Huxley in England in the 1930s, connected with him again in the U.S. in the early 1960s and wrote that “the enormous intellect, the beautifully modulated voice, the gentle objectivity, all were unchanged. He was one of the most highly civilized human beings I had ever met.”
Late-in-life perspectives.
Biographer Harold H. Watts wrote that Huxley's writings in the "final and extended period of his life" are "the work of a man who is meditating on the central problems of many modern men". Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these, he made some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace, Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency towards distinctly hierarchical social organisation; the crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to persuasion; the tendency to promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities. In a December 1962 letter to brother Julian, summarizing a paper he had presented in Santa Barbara, he wrote, "What I said was that if we didn't pretty quickly start thinking of human problems in ecological terms rather than in terms of power politics we should very soon be in a bad way."
Huxley's engagement with Eastern wisdom traditions was entirely compatible with a strong appreciation of modern science. Biographer Milton Birnbaum wrote that Huxley "ended by embracing both science and Eastern religion". In his last book, "Literature and Science", Huxley wrote that "The ethical and philosophical implications of modern science are more Buddhist than Christian..." In "A Philosopher's Visionary Prediction," published one month before he died, Huxley endorsed training in general semantics and "the nonverbal world of culturally uncontaminated consciousness," writing that "We must learn how to be mentally silent, we must cultivate the art of pure receptivity... [T]he individual must learn to decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in."
Association with Vedanta.
Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda. Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and other followers, he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices.
In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God", translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California.
From 1941 until 1960, Huxley contributed 48 articles to "Vedanta and the West", published by the society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John Van Druten from 1951 through 1962.
Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: "Knowledge and Understanding" and "Who Are We?" from 1955. Nonetheless, Huxley's agnosticism, together with his speculative propensity, made it difficult for him to fully embrace any form of institutionalised religion.
Psychedelic drug use and mystical experiences.
In early 1953, Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline. Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Doctor Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist then employed in a Canadian institution, and eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline; Osmond obliged and supervised Huxley's session in southern California. After the publication of "The Doors of Perception", in which he recounted this experience, Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda disagreed about the meaning and importance of the psychedelic drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions. Huxley later had an experience on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in "The Doors of Perception".
Huxley wrote that "The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life."
Having tried LSD in the 1950s, he became an advisor to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in their early-1960s research work with psychedelic drugs at Harvard. Personality differences led Huxley to distance himself from Leary, when Huxley grew concerned that Leary had become too keen on promoting the drugs rather indiscriminately, even playing the rebel with a fondness for publicity.
Eyesight.
Differing accounts exist about the details of the quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life. Circa 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates method, in which he was instructed by Margaret Darst Corbett. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a "ranchito" in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northern Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that, for the first time in more than 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his experiences with the Bates method, "The Art of Seeing", which was published in 1942 (U.S.), 1943 (UK). The book contained some generally disputed theories, and its publication created a growing degree of popular controversy about Huxley's eyesight.
It was, and is, widely believed that Huxley was nearly blind since the illness in his teens, despite the partial recovery that had enabled him to study at Oxford. For example, some ten years after publication of "The Art of Seeing", in 1952, Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty: "Then suddenly he faltered—and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment."
Brazilian author João Ubaldo Ribeiro, who as a young journalist spent several evenings in the Huxleys' company in the late 1950s, wrote that Huxley had said to him, with a wry smile: "I can hardly see at all. And I don't give a damn, really."
On the other hand, Huxley's second wife Laura later emphasised in her biographical account, "This Timeless Moment": "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight." After revealing a letter she wrote to the "Los Angeles Times" disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow who can hardly see" by Walter C. Alvarez, she tempered her statement: "Although I feel it was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance, although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens." Laura Huxley proceeded to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, agrees with the following sample of Huxley's own words from "The Art of Seeing": "The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable." Nevertheless, the topic of Huxley's eyesight has continued to endure similar, significant controversy.
American popular science author Steven Johnson, in his book "Mind Wide Open", quotes Huxley about his difficulties with visual encoding: "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon ..."
Personal life.
Huxley married on 10 July 1919 Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian epidemiologist from Bellem, a village near Aalter, he met at Garsington, Oxfordshire, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist. In 1955, Maria Huxley died of cancer.
In 1956, Huxley married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author, as well as a violinist and psychotherapist. She wrote "This Timeless Moment", a biography of Huxley. She told the story of their marriage through Mary Ann Braubach's 2010 documentary, "Huxley on Huxley".
Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960; in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel "Island", and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" both at the UCSF Medical Center and at the Esalen Institute. These lectures were fundamental to the beginning of the Human Potential Movement.
Huxley was a close friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, and was involved in the creation of the Happy Valley School, now Besant Hill School, of Happy Valley, in Ojai, California.
The most substantial collection of Huxley's few remaining papers, following the destruction of most in the 1961 Bel Air Fire, is at the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. Some are also at the Stanford University Libraries.
On 9 April 1962 Huxley was informed he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, the senior literary organisation in Britain, and he accepted the title via letter on 28 April 1962. The correspondence between Huxley and the society is kept at the Cambridge University Library. The society invited Huxley to appear at a banquet and give a lecture at Somerset House, London, in June 1963. Huxley wrote a draft of the speech he intended to give at the society; however, his deteriorating health meant he was not able to attend.
Death.
On his deathbed, unable to speak owing to advanced laryngeal cancer, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." According to her account of his death in "This Timeless Moment", she obliged with an injection at 11:20 a.m. and a second dose an hour later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. PST on 22 November 1963.
Media coverage of Huxley's death, along with that of fellow British author C. S. Lewis, was overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the same day, less than seven hours before Huxley's death. In a 2009 article for "New York" magazine titled "The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club", Christopher Bonanos wrote:
This coincidence served as the basis for Peter Kreeft's book "Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley", which imagines a conversation among the three men taking place in Purgatory following their deaths.
Huxley's memorial service took place in London in December 1963; it was led by his elder brother Julian. On 27 October 1971, his ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, Guildford, Surrey, England.
Huxley had been a long-time friend of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who dedicated his last orchestral composition to Huxley. What became "" was begun in July 1963, completed in October 1964, and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on 17 April 1965.
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Ayn Rand
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Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; , 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand (), was a Russian-born American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, "The Fountainhead". In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel "Atlas Shrugged". Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge; she rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism. Instead, she supported "laissez-faire" capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including private property rights. Although Rand opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism, she is often associated with the modern libertarian movement in the United States. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals.
Rand's books have sold over 37 million copies. Her fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics. Although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her philosophy because of her polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Her writings have politically influenced some right-libertarians and conservatives. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.
Life.
Early life.
Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (). She was twelve when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had enjoyed previously. Her father's business was confiscated, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.
When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, she was in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. Along with many other bourgeois students, she was purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many of the purged students were reinstated in the university. Rand was among these reinstated students and she completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, which became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be "Rand", and she adopted the first name "Ayn" (pronounced ).
In late 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She departed on January 17, 1926, and arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives learning English before leaving for Hollywood, California.
In Hollywood, a chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film "The King of Kings" and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on "The King of Kings", she met an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor; the two married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. She made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to obtain 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. Her courtroom drama "Night of January 16th", first staged in Hollywood in 1934, reopened successfully on Broadway in 1935. Each night, a jury was selected from members of the audience; based on its vote, one of two different endings would be performed.
Her 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. Initial sales were slow, and the American publisher let it go out of print, although European editions continued to sell. She adapted the story as a stage play, but the Broadway production was a failure and closed in less than a week. 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.
Rand started her next major novel, "The Fountainhead", in December 1935, but took a break from it in 1937 to write her novella "Anthem". The novella 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 could not find an American publisher at that time. As with "We the Living", Rand's later success allowed her to get a revised version published in 1946, which has sold over 3.5 million copies.
"The Fountainhead" and political activism.
During the 1940s, Rand became politically active. She and her husband were full-time volunteers for Republican Wendell Willkie's 1940 presidential campaign. This work brought her into contact with other intellectuals sympathetic to free-market capitalism. She became friends with journalist Henry Hazlitt, who introduced her to the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Despite philosophical differences with them, Rand strongly endorsed the writings of both men throughout her career, and they expressed admiration for her. Mises once referred to her as "the most courageous man in America", a compliment that particularly pleased her because he said "man" instead of "woman". Rand became friends with libertarian writer Isabel Paterson. Rand questioned her about American history and politics long into the night during their many meetings, and gave Paterson ideas for her only non-fiction book, "The God of the Machine".
Rand's first major success as a writer came in 1943 with "The Fountainhead", a novel about an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers"—those who attempt to live through others, placing others above themselves. Twelve publishers rejected it before Bobbs-Merrill Company accepted it at the insistence of editor Archibald Ogden, who threatened to quit if his employer did not publish it. While completing the novel, Rand was prescribed the amphetamine Benzedrine to fight fatigue. The drug helped her to work long hours to meet her deadline for delivering the novel, but afterwards she was so exhausted that her doctor ordered two weeks' rest. Her use of the drug for approximately three decades may have contributed to what some of her later associates described as volatile mood swings.
The success of "The Fountainhead" brought Rand fame and financial security. In 1943, she sold the film rights to Warner Bros. and returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay. Producer Hal B. Wallis hired her afterwards as a screenwriter and script-doctor. Her work for him included the screenplays for "Love Letters" and "You Came Along". Her contract with Wallis also allowed time for other projects, including a never-completed nonfiction treatment of her philosophy to be called "The Moral Basis of Individualism".
While working in Hollywood, Rand became involved with the anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and wrote articles on the group's behalf. She also joined the anti-Communist American Writers Association. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the United States House Un-American Activities Committee that the 1944 film "Song of Russia" grossly misrepresented conditions in the Soviet Union, portraying life there as much better and happier than it was. She also wanted to criticize the lauded 1946 film "The Best Years of Our Lives" for what she interpreted as its negative presentation of the business world, but was not allowed to do so. When asked after the hearings about her feelings on the investigations' effectiveness, Rand described the process as "futile".
After several delays, the film version of "The Fountainhead" was released in 1949. Although it used Rand's screenplay with minimal alterations, she "disliked the movie from beginning to end" and complained about its editing, the acting and other elements.
"Atlas Shrugged" and Objectivism.
Following the publication of "The Fountainhead", Rand received many letters from readers, some of whom the book had influenced profoundly. In 1951, Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers that included future chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Barbara's cousin Leonard Peikoff. Initially, the group was an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand at her apartment on weekends to discuss philosophy. Later, Rand began allowing them to read the manuscript drafts of her new novel, "Atlas Shrugged". In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the knowledge of their spouses.
Published in 1957, "Atlas Shrugged" is considered Rand's "magnum opus". She described the novel's theme as "the role of the mind in man's existence—and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest". It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her concept of human achievement. The plot involves a dystopian United States in which the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists respond to a welfare state government by going on strike and retreating to a hidden valley where they build an independent free economy. The novel's hero and leader of the strike, John Galt, describes it as stopping "the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds of the individuals contributing most to the nation's wealth and achievements. The novel contains an exposition of Objectivism in a lengthy monologue delivered by Galt.
Despite many negative reviews, "Atlas Shrugged" became an international bestseller, but the reaction of intellectuals to the novel discouraged and depressed Rand. "Atlas Shrugged" was her last completed work of fiction, marking the end of her career as a novelist and the beginning of her role as a popular philosopher.
In 1958, Nathaniel Branden established the Nathaniel Branden Lectures, later incorporated as the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), to promote Rand's philosophy through public lectures. He and Rand co-founded "The Objectivist Newsletter" (later renamed "The Objectivist") in 1962 to circulate articles about her ideas; she later republished some of these articles in book form. Rand was unimpressed by many of the NBI students and held them to strict standards, sometimes reacting coldly or angrily to those who disagreed with her. Critics, including some former NBI students and Branden himself, later described the culture of the NBI as one of intellectual conformity and excessive reverence for Rand. Some described the NBI or the Objectivist movement as a cult or religion. Rand expressed opinions on a wide range of topics, from literature and music to sexuality and facial hair. Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers. However, some former NBI students believed the extent of these behaviors was exaggerated, and the problem was concentrated among Rand's closest followers in New York.
Later years.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her nonfiction works and by giving talks to students at colleges and universities. She began delivering annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, responding to questions from the audience. During these appearances, she often took controversial stances on the political and social issues of the day. These included: supporting abortion rights, opposing the Vietnam War and the military draft (but condemning many draft dodgers as "bums"), supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 against a coalition of Arab nations as "civilized men fighting savages", saying European colonists had the right to invade and take land inhabited by American Indians, and calling homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting", while also advocating the repeal of all laws concerning it. She endorsed several Republican candidates for president of the United States, most strongly Barry Goldwater in 1964, whose candidacy she promoted in several articles for "The Objectivist Newsletter".
In 1964, Nathaniel Branden began an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden kept the affair hidden from Rand. When she learned of it in 1968, though her romantic relationship with Branden had already ended, Rand ended her relationship with both Brandens, and the NBI was closed. She published an article in "The Objectivist" repudiating Nathaniel Branden for dishonesty and other "irrational behavior in his private life". In subsequent years, Rand and several more of her closest associates parted company.
Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974 after decades of heavy smoking. In 1976, she retired from writing her newsletter and, after her initial objections, allowed a social worker employed by her attorney to enroll her in Social Security and Medicare. During the late 1970s, her activities within the Objectivist movement declined, especially after the death of her husband on November 9, 1979. One of her final projects was work on a never-completed television adaptation of "Atlas Shrugged".
On March 6, 1982, Rand died of heart failure at her home in New York City. At her funeral, a floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket. In her will, Rand named Peikoff as her heir.
Early life.
Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (). She was twelve when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had enjoyed previously. Her father's business was confiscated, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.
When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, she was in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. Along with many other bourgeois students, she was purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many of the purged students were reinstated in the university. Rand was among these reinstated students and she completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, which became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be "Rand", and she adopted the first name "Ayn" (pronounced ).
In late 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She departed on January 17, 1926, and arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives learning English before leaving for Hollywood, California.
In Hollywood, a chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film "The King of Kings" and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on "The King of Kings", she met an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor; the two married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. She made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to obtain 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. Her courtroom drama "Night of January 16th", first staged in Hollywood in 1934, reopened successfully on Broadway in 1935. Each night, a jury was selected from members of the audience; based on its vote, one of two different endings would be performed.
Her 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. Initial sales were slow, and the American publisher let it go out of print, although European editions continued to sell. She adapted the story as a stage play, but the Broadway production was a failure and closed in less than a week. 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.
Rand started her next major novel, "The Fountainhead", in December 1935, but took a break from it in 1937 to write her novella "Anthem". The novella 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 could not find an American publisher at that time. As with "We the Living", Rand's later success allowed her to get a revised version published in 1946, which has sold over 3.5 million copies.
"The Fountainhead" and political activism.
During the 1940s, Rand became politically active. She and her husband were full-time volunteers for Republican Wendell Willkie's 1940 presidential campaign. This work brought her into contact with other intellectuals sympathetic to free-market capitalism. She became friends with journalist Henry Hazlitt, who introduced her to the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Despite philosophical differences with them, Rand strongly endorsed the writings of both men throughout her career, and they expressed admiration for her. Mises once referred to her as "the most courageous man in America", a compliment that particularly pleased her because he said "man" instead of "woman". Rand became friends with libertarian writer Isabel Paterson. Rand questioned her about American history and politics long into the night during their many meetings, and gave Paterson ideas for her only non-fiction book, "The God of the Machine".
Rand's first major success as a writer came in 1943 with "The Fountainhead", a novel about an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers"—those who attempt to live through others, placing others above themselves. Twelve publishers rejected it before Bobbs-Merrill Company accepted it at the insistence of editor Archibald Ogden, who threatened to quit if his employer did not publish it. While completing the novel, Rand was prescribed the amphetamine Benzedrine to fight fatigue. The drug helped her to work long hours to meet her deadline for delivering the novel, but afterwards she was so exhausted that her doctor ordered two weeks' rest. Her use of the drug for approximately three decades may have contributed to what some of her later associates described as volatile mood swings.
The success of "The Fountainhead" brought Rand fame and financial security. In 1943, she sold the film rights to Warner Bros. and returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay. Producer Hal B. Wallis hired her afterwards as a screenwriter and script-doctor. Her work for him included the screenplays for "Love Letters" and "You Came Along". Her contract with Wallis also allowed time for other projects, including a never-completed nonfiction treatment of her philosophy to be called "The Moral Basis of Individualism".
While working in Hollywood, Rand became involved with the anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and wrote articles on the group's behalf. She also joined the anti-Communist American Writers Association. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the United States House Un-American Activities Committee that the 1944 film "Song of Russia" grossly misrepresented conditions in the Soviet Union, portraying life there as much better and happier than it was. She also wanted to criticize the lauded 1946 film "The Best Years of Our Lives" for what she interpreted as its negative presentation of the business world, but was not allowed to do so. When asked after the hearings about her feelings on the investigations' effectiveness, Rand described the process as "futile".
After several delays, the film version of "The Fountainhead" was released in 1949. Although it used Rand's screenplay with minimal alterations, she "disliked the movie from beginning to end" and complained about its editing, the acting and other elements.
"Atlas Shrugged" and Objectivism.
Following the publication of "The Fountainhead", Rand received many letters from readers, some of whom the book had influenced profoundly. In 1951, Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers that included future chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Barbara's cousin Leonard Peikoff. Initially, the group was an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand at her apartment on weekends to discuss philosophy. Later, Rand began allowing them to read the manuscript drafts of her new novel, "Atlas Shrugged". In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the knowledge of their spouses.
Published in 1957, "Atlas Shrugged" is considered Rand's "magnum opus". She described the novel's theme as "the role of the mind in man's existence—and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest". It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her concept of human achievement. The plot involves a dystopian United States in which the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists respond to a welfare state government by going on strike and retreating to a hidden valley where they build an independent free economy. The novel's hero and leader of the strike, John Galt, describes it as stopping "the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds of the individuals contributing most to the nation's wealth and achievements. The novel contains an exposition of Objectivism in a lengthy monologue delivered by Galt.
Despite many negative reviews, "Atlas Shrugged" became an international bestseller, but the reaction of intellectuals to the novel discouraged and depressed Rand. "Atlas Shrugged" was her last completed work of fiction, marking the end of her career as a novelist and the beginning of her role as a popular philosopher.
In 1958, Nathaniel Branden established the Nathaniel Branden Lectures, later incorporated as the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), to promote Rand's philosophy through public lectures. He and Rand co-founded "The Objectivist Newsletter" (later renamed "The Objectivist") in 1962 to circulate articles about her ideas; she later republished some of these articles in book form. Rand was unimpressed by many of the NBI students and held them to strict standards, sometimes reacting coldly or angrily to those who disagreed with her. Critics, including some former NBI students and Branden himself, later described the culture of the NBI as one of intellectual conformity and excessive reverence for Rand. Some described the NBI or the Objectivist movement as a cult or religion. Rand expressed opinions on a wide range of topics, from literature and music to sexuality and facial hair. Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers. However, some former NBI students believed the extent of these behaviors was exaggerated, and the problem was concentrated among Rand's closest followers in New York.
Later years.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her nonfiction works and by giving talks to students at colleges and universities. She began delivering annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, responding to questions from the audience. During these appearances, she often took controversial stances on the political and social issues of the day. These included: supporting abortion rights, opposing the Vietnam War and the military draft (but condemning many draft dodgers as "bums"), supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 against a coalition of Arab nations as "civilized men fighting savages", saying European colonists had the right to invade and take land inhabited by American Indians, and calling homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting", while also advocating the repeal of all laws concerning it. She endorsed several Republican candidates for president of the United States, most strongly Barry Goldwater in 1964, whose candidacy she promoted in several articles for "The Objectivist Newsletter".
In 1964, Nathaniel Branden began an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden kept the affair hidden from Rand. When she learned of it in 1968, though her romantic relationship with Branden had already ended, Rand ended her relationship with both Brandens, and the NBI was closed. She published an article in "The Objectivist" repudiating Nathaniel Branden for dishonesty and other "irrational behavior in his private life". In subsequent years, Rand and several more of her closest associates parted company.
Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974 after decades of heavy smoking. In 1976, she retired from writing her newsletter and, after her initial objections, allowed a social worker employed by her attorney to enroll her in Social Security and Medicare. During the late 1970s, her activities within the Objectivist movement declined, especially after the death of her husband on November 9, 1979. One of her final projects was work on a never-completed television adaptation of "Atlas Shrugged".
On March 6, 1982, Rand died of heart failure at her home in New York City. At her funeral, a floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket. In her will, Rand named Peikoff as her heir.
Literary approach and influences.
Rand described her approach to literature as "romantic realism". She wanted her fiction to present the world "as it could be and should be", rather than as it was. This approach led her to create highly stylized situations and characters. Her fiction typically has protagonists who are heroic individualists, depicted as fit and attractive. Her villains support duty and collectivist moral ideals. Rand often describes them as unattractive, and some have names that suggest negative traits, such as Wesley Mouch in "Atlas Shrugged".
Rand considered plot a critical element of literature, and her stories typically have what biographer Anne Heller described as "tight, elaborate, fast-paced plotting". Romantic triangles are a common plot element in Rand's fiction; in most of her novels and plays, the main female character is romantically involved with at least two different men.
Influences.
In school Rand read works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich Schiller, who became her favorites. She considered them to be among the "top rank" of Romantic writers because of their focus on moral themes and their skill at constructing plots. Hugo was an important influence on her writing, especially her approach to plotting. In the introduction she wrote for an English-language edition of his novel "Ninety-Three", Rand called him "the greatest novelist in world literature".
Although Rand disliked most Russian literature, her depictions of her heroes show the influence of the Russian Symbolists and other nineteenth-century Russian writing, most notably the 1863 novel "What Is to Be Done?" by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Rand's experience of the Russian Revolution and early Communist Russia influenced the portrayal of her villains. Beyond "We the Living", which is set in Russia, this influence can be seen in the ideas and rhetoric of Ellsworth Toohey in "The Fountainhead", and in the destruction of the economy in "Atlas Shrugged".
Rand's descriptive style echoes her early career writing scenarios and scripts for movies; her novels have many narrative descriptions that resemble early Hollywood movie scenarios. They often follow common film editing conventions, such as having a broad establishing shot description of a scene followed by close-up details, and her descriptions of women characters often take a "male gaze" perspective.
Influences.
In school Rand read works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich Schiller, who became her favorites. She considered them to be among the "top rank" of Romantic writers because of their focus on moral themes and their skill at constructing plots. Hugo was an important influence on her writing, especially her approach to plotting. In the introduction she wrote for an English-language edition of his novel "Ninety-Three", Rand called him "the greatest novelist in world literature".
Although Rand disliked most Russian literature, her depictions of her heroes show the influence of the Russian Symbolists and other nineteenth-century Russian writing, most notably the 1863 novel "What Is to Be Done?" by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Rand's experience of the Russian Revolution and early Communist Russia influenced the portrayal of her villains. Beyond "We the Living", which is set in Russia, this influence can be seen in the ideas and rhetoric of Ellsworth Toohey in "The Fountainhead", and in the destruction of the economy in "Atlas Shrugged".
Rand's descriptive style echoes her early career writing scenarios and scripts for movies; her novels have many narrative descriptions that resemble early Hollywood movie scenarios. They often follow common film editing conventions, such as having a broad establishing shot description of a scene followed by close-up details, and her descriptions of women characters often take a "male gaze" perspective.
Philosophy.
Rand called her philosophy "Objectivism", describing its essence as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". She considered Objectivism a systematic philosophy and laid out positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.
In metaphysics, Rand supported philosophical realism and opposed anything she regarded as mysticism or supernaturalism, including all forms of religion. Rand believed in free will as a form of agent causation and rejected determinism.
In epistemology, Rand considered all knowledge to be based on sense perception, the validity of which she considered axiomatic, and reason, which she described as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses". Rand rejected all claims of non-perceptual knowledge, including instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing. In her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", Rand presented a theory of concept formation and rejected the analytic–synthetic dichotomy. She believed epistemology was a foundational branch of philosophy and considered the advocacy of reason to be the single most significant aspect of her philosophy.
In ethics, Rand argued for rational and ethical egoism (rational self-interest), as the guiding moral principle. She said the individual should "exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself". Rand referred to egoism as "the virtue of selfishness" in her book of that title. In it, she presented her solution to the is–ought problem by describing a meta-ethical theory that based morality in the needs of "man's survival qua man". She condemned ethical altruism as incompatible with the requirements of human life and happiness, and held the initiation of force was evil and irrational, writing in "Atlas Shrugged" that, "Force and mind are opposites".
Rand's political philosophy emphasized individual rights, including property rights. She considered "laissez-faire" capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on protecting those rights. Rand opposed collectivism and statism, which she understood to include many specific forms of government, such as communism, fascism, socialism, theocracy, and the welfare state. Her preferred form of government was a constitutional republic that is limited to the protection of individual rights. Although her political views are often classified as conservative or libertarian, Rand preferred the term "radical for capitalism". She worked with conservatives on political projects, but disagreed with them over issues such as religion and ethics. Rand denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism. She rejected anarchism as a naive theory based in subjectivism that would lead to collectivism in practice.
In aesthetics, Rand defined art as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments". According to her, art allows philosophical concepts to be presented in a concrete form that can be grasped easily, thereby fulfilling a need of human consciousness. As a writer, the art form Rand focused on most closely was literature. She considered romanticism to be the approach that most accurately reflected the existence of human free will.
Criticisms.
Rand's ethics and politics are the most criticized areas of her philosophy. Numerous authors, including Robert Nozick and William F. O'Neill, in some of the earliest academic critiques of her ideas, said she failed in her attempt to solve the is–ought problem. Critics have called her definitions of "egoism" and "altruism" biased and inconsistent with normal usage. Critics from religious traditions oppose her atheism and her rejection of altruism.
Multiple critics, including Nozick, have said her attempt to justify individual rights based on egoism fails. Others, like libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer, have gone further, saying that her support of egoism and her support of individual rights are inconsistent positions. Some critics, like Roy Childs, have said that her opposition to the initiation of force should lead to support of anarchism, rather than limited government.
Commentators, including Hazel Barnes, Albert Ellis, and Nathaniel Branden, have criticized Rand's focus on the importance of reason. Branden said this emphasis led her to denigrate emotions and create unrealistic expectations of how consistently rational human beings should be.
Relationship to other philosophers.
Except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals, Rand was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her. Acknowledging Aristotle as her greatest influence, Rand remarked that in the history of philosophy she could only recommend "three A's"—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, when asked where her philosophy came from, she responded: "Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me."
In an article for the "Claremont Review of Books", political scientist Charles Murray criticized her claim that her only "philosophical debt" was to Aristotle. He asserted her ideas were derivative of previous thinkers such as John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rand found early inspiration from Nietzsche, and scholars have found indications of this in Rand's private journals. In 1928, she alluded to his idea of the "superman" in notes for an unwritten novel whose protagonist was inspired by the murderer William Edward Hickman. There are other indications of Nietzsche's influence in passages from the first edition of "We the Living" (which Rand later revised), and in her overall writing style. By the time she wrote "The Fountainhead", Rand had turned against Nietzsche's ideas, and the extent of his influence on her even during her early years is disputed.
Rand considered her philosophical opposite to be Immanuel Kant, whom she referred to as "the most evil man in mankind's history"; she believed his epistemology undermined reason and his ethics opposed self-interest. Philosophers George Walsh and Fred Seddon have argued she misinterpreted Kant and exaggerated their differences. She was also critical of Plato, and viewed his differences with Aristotle on questions of metaphysics and epistemology as the primary conflict in the history of philosophy.
Rand's relationship with contemporary philosophers was mostly antagonistic. She was not an academic and did not participate in academic discourse. She was dismissive toward critics and wrote about ideas she disagreed with in a polemical manner without in-depth analysis. She was in turn viewed very negatively by many academic philosophers, who dismissed her as an unimportant figure who need not be given serious consideration.
Criticisms.
Rand's ethics and politics are the most criticized areas of her philosophy. Numerous authors, including Robert Nozick and William F. O'Neill, in some of the earliest academic critiques of her ideas, said she failed in her attempt to solve the is–ought problem. Critics have called her definitions of "egoism" and "altruism" biased and inconsistent with normal usage. Critics from religious traditions oppose her atheism and her rejection of altruism.
Multiple critics, including Nozick, have said her attempt to justify individual rights based on egoism fails. Others, like libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer, have gone further, saying that her support of egoism and her support of individual rights are inconsistent positions. Some critics, like Roy Childs, have said that her opposition to the initiation of force should lead to support of anarchism, rather than limited government.
Commentators, including Hazel Barnes, Albert Ellis, and Nathaniel Branden, have criticized Rand's focus on the importance of reason. Branden said this emphasis led her to denigrate emotions and create unrealistic expectations of how consistently rational human beings should be.
Relationship to other philosophers.
Except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals, Rand was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her. Acknowledging Aristotle as her greatest influence, Rand remarked that in the history of philosophy she could only recommend "three A's"—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, when asked where her philosophy came from, she responded: "Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me."
In an article for the "Claremont Review of Books", political scientist Charles Murray criticized her claim that her only "philosophical debt" was to Aristotle. He asserted her ideas were derivative of previous thinkers such as John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rand found early inspiration from Nietzsche, and scholars have found indications of this in Rand's private journals. In 1928, she alluded to his idea of the "superman" in notes for an unwritten novel whose protagonist was inspired by the murderer William Edward Hickman. There are other indications of Nietzsche's influence in passages from the first edition of "We the Living" (which Rand later revised), and in her overall writing style. By the time she wrote "The Fountainhead", Rand had turned against Nietzsche's ideas, and the extent of his influence on her even during her early years is disputed.
Rand considered her philosophical opposite to be Immanuel Kant, whom she referred to as "the most evil man in mankind's history"; she believed his epistemology undermined reason and his ethics opposed self-interest. Philosophers George Walsh and Fred Seddon have argued she misinterpreted Kant and exaggerated their differences. She was also critical of Plato, and viewed his differences with Aristotle on questions of metaphysics and epistemology as the primary conflict in the history of philosophy.
Rand's relationship with contemporary philosophers was mostly antagonistic. She was not an academic and did not participate in academic discourse. She was dismissive toward critics and wrote about ideas she disagreed with in a polemical manner without in-depth analysis. She was in turn viewed very negatively by many academic philosophers, who dismissed her as an unimportant figure who need not be given serious consideration.
Reception and legacy.
Critical reception.
The first reviews Rand received were for "Night of January 16th". Reviews of the Broadway production were largely positive, but Rand considered even positive reviews to be embarrassing because of significant changes made to her script by the producer. Although Rand believed that her novel "We the Living" was not widely reviewed, over 200 publications published approximately 125 different reviews. Overall, they were more positive than those she received for her later work. Her novella "Anthem" received little review attention, both for its first publication in England and for subsequent re-issues.
Rand's first bestseller, "The Fountainhead", received far fewer reviews than "We the Living", and reviewers' opinions were mixed. Lorine Pruette's positive review in "The New York Times", which called the author "a writer of great power" who wrote "brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly", was one that Rand greatly appreciated. There were other positive reviews, but Rand dismissed most of them for either misunderstanding her message or for being in unimportant publications. Some negative reviews said the novel was too long; others called the characters unsympathetic and Rand's style "offensively pedestrian".
"Atlas Shrugged" was widely reviewed, and many of the reviews were strongly negative. "Atlas Shrugged" received positive reviews from a few publications, but Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs", with reviews including comments that it was "written out of hate" and showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". Whittaker Chambers wrote what was later called the novel's most "notorious" review for the conservative magazine "National Review". He accused Rand of supporting a godless system (which he related to that of the Soviets), claiming, "From almost any page of "Atlas Shrugged", a voice can be heard ... commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!.
Rand's nonfiction received far fewer reviews than her novels. The tenor of the criticism for her first nonfiction book, "For the New Intellectual", was similar to that for "Atlas Shrugged". Philosopher Sidney Hook likened her certainty to "the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union", and author Gore Vidal called her viewpoint "nearly perfect in its immorality". These reviews set the pattern for reaction to her ideas among liberal critics. Her subsequent books got progressively less review attention.
Popular interest.
With over 37 million copies sold , Rand's books continue to be read widely. A survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1991 asked club members to name the most influential book in their lives. Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was the second most popular choice, after the Bible. Although Rand's influence has been greatest in the United States, there has been international interest in her work.
Rand's contemporary admirers included fellow novelists, like Ira Levin, Kay Nolte Smith and L. Neil Smith; she has influenced later writers like Erika Holzer, Terry Goodkind, and comic book artist Steve Ditko. Rand provided a positive view of business and subsequently many business executives and entrepreneurs have admired and promoted her work. Businessmen such as John Allison of BB&T and Ed Snider of Comcast Spectacor have funded the promotion of Rand's ideas.
Television shows, movies, and video games have referred to Rand and her works. Throughout her life she was the subject of many articles in popular magazines, as well as book-length critiques by authors such as the psychologist Albert Ellis and Trinity Foundation president John W. Robbins. Rand or characters based on her figure prominently in novels by American authors, including Mary Gaitskill, Matt Ruff, Kay Nolte Smith, and Tobias Wolff. Nick Gillespie, former editor-in-chief of "Reason", remarked that, "Rand's is a tortured immortality, one in which she's as likely to be a punch line as a protagonist. Jibes at Rand as cold and inhuman run through the popular culture." Two movies have been made about Rand's life. A 1997 documentary film, "", was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. "The Passion of Ayn Rand", a 1999 television adaptation of the book of the same name, won several awards. Rand's image also appears on a 1999 U.S. postage stamp illustrated by artist Nick Gaetano.
Rand's works, most commonly "Anthem" or "The Fountainhead", are sometimes assigned as secondary school reading. Since 2002, the Ayn Rand Institute has provided free copies of Rand's novels to teachers who promise to include the books in their curriculum. The Institute had distributed 4.5 million copies in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2020. In 2017, Rand was added to the required reading list for the A Level Politics exam in the United Kingdom.
Political influence.
Although she rejected the labels "conservative" and "libertarian", Rand has had a continuing influence on right-wing politics and libertarianism. Rand is often considered one of the three most important women (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) in the early development of modern American libertarianism. David Nolan, one founder of the Libertarian Party, said that "without Ayn Rand, the libertarian movement would not exist". In his history of that movement, journalist Brian Doherty described her as "the most influential libertarian of the twentieth century to the public at large". Political scientist Andrew Koppelman called her "the most widely read libertarian". Historian Jennifer Burns referred to her as "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right".
The political figures who cite Rand as an influence are usually conservatives (often members of the Republican Party), despite Rand taking some atypical positions for a conservative, like being pro-choice and an atheist. She faced intense opposition from William F. Buckley Jr. and other contributors to the conservative "National Review" magazine, which published numerous criticisms of her writings and ideas. Nevertheless, a 1987 article in "The New York Times" referred to her as the Reagan administration's "novelist laureate". Republican congressmen and conservative pundits have acknowledged her influence on their lives and have recommended her novels. She has influenced some conservative politicians outside the U.S., such as Sajid Javid in the United Kingdom, Siv Jensen in Norway, and Ayelet Shaked in Israel.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 spurred renewed interest in her works, especially "Atlas Shrugged", which some saw as foreshadowing the crisis. Opinion articles compared real-world events with the novel's plot. Signs mentioning Rand and her fictional hero John Galt appeared at Tea Party protests. There was increased criticism of her ideas, especially from the political left. Critics blamed the economic crisis on her support of selfishness and free markets, particularly through her influence on Alan Greenspan. In 2015, Adam Weiner said that through Greenspan, "Rand had effectively chucked a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy". Lisa Duggan said that Rand's novels had "incalculable impact" in encouraging the spread of neoliberal political ideas. In 2021, Cass Sunstein said Rand's ideas could be seen in the tax and regulatory policies of the Trump administration, which he attributed to the "enduring influence" of Rand's fiction.
Academic reaction.
During Rand's lifetime, her work received little attention from academic scholars. Since her death, interest in her work has increased gradually. In 2009, historian Jennifer Burns identified "three overlapping waves" of scholarly interest in Rand, including "an explosion of scholarship" since 2000. As of that year, few universities included Rand or Objectivism as a philosophical specialty or research area, with many literature and philosophy departments dismissing her as a pop culture phenomenon rather than a subject for serious study. From 2002 to 2012, over 60 colleges and universities accepted grants from the charitable foundation of BB&T Corporation that required teaching Rand's ideas or works; in some cases, the grants were controversial or even rejected because of the requirement to teach about Rand.
In 2020, media critic Eric Burns said that, "Rand is surely the most engaging philosopher of my lifetime", but "nobody in the academe pays any attention to her, neither as an author nor a philosopher". That same year, the editor of a collection of critical essays about Rand said academics who disapproved of her ideas had long held "a stubborn resolve to ignore or ridicule" her work, but he believed more academic critics were engaging with her work in recent years.
To her ideas.
In 1967, John Hospers discussed Rand's ethical ideas in the second edition of his textbook, "An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis". That same year, Hazel Barnes included a chapter critiquing Objectivism in her book "An Existentialist Ethics". When the first full-length academic book about Rand's philosophy appeared in 1971, its author declared writing about Rand "a treacherous undertaking" that could lead to "guilt by association" for taking her seriously. A few articles about Rand's ideas appeared in academic journals before her death in 1982, many of them in "The Personalist". One of these was "On the Randian Argument" by libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, who criticized her meta-ethical arguments. Other philosophers, writing in the same publication, argued that Nozick misstated Rand's case. In an article responding to Nozick, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen defended her positions, but described her style as "literary, hyperbolic and emotional".
"The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand", a 1984 collection of essays about Objectivism edited by Den Uyl and Rasmussen, was the first academic book about Rand's ideas published after her death. In one essay, political writer Jack Wheeler wrote that despite "the incessant bombast and continuous venting of Randian rage", Rand's ethics are "a most immense achievement, the study of which is vastly more fruitful than any other in contemporary thought". In 1987, the Ayn Rand Society was founded as an affiliate of the American Philosophical Association.
In a 1995 entry about Rand in "Contemporary Women Philosophers", Jenny A. Heyl described a divergence in how different academic specialties viewed Rand. She said that Rand's philosophy "is regularly omitted from academic philosophy. Yet, throughout literary academia, Ayn Rand is considered a philosopher." Writing in the 1998 edition of the "Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy", political theorist Chandran Kukathas summarized the mainstream philosophical reception of her work in two parts. He said most commentators view her ethical argument as an unconvincing variant of Aristotle's ethics, and her political theory "is of little interest" because it is marred by an "ill-thought out and unsystematic" effort to reconcile her hostility to the state with her rejection of anarchism. "The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies", a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of Rand and her ideas, was established in 1999.
In a 2010 essay for the Cato Institute, Huemer argued very few people find Rand's ideas convincing, especially her ethics. He attributed the attention she receives to her being a "compelling writer", especially as a novelist, noting that "Atlas Shrugged" outsells Rand's non-fiction works and the works of other philosophers of classical liberalism. In 2012, the Pennsylvania State University Press agreed to take over publication of "The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies", and the University of Pittsburgh Press launched an "Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies" series based on the Society's proceedings. The Fall 2012 update to the entry about Rand in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" said that "only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously". That same year, political scientist Alan Wolfe dismissed Rand as a "nonperson" among academics, an attitude that writer Ben Murnane later described as "the traditional academic view" of Rand. Philosopher Skye C. Cleary wrote in a 2018 article for "Aeon" that, "Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It's trendy to scoff at any mention of her." However, Cleary said that because many people take Rand's ideas seriously, philosophers "need to treat the Ayn Rand phenomenon seriously" and provide refutations rather than ignoring her.
To her fiction.
Academic consideration of Rand as a literary figure during her life was even more limited than the discussion of her philosophy. Mimi Reisel Gladstein could not find any scholarly articles about Rand's novels when she began researching her in 1973, and only three such articles appeared during the rest of the 1970s. Since her death, scholars of English and American literature have continued largely to ignore her work, although attention to her literary work has increased since the 1990s. Several academic book series about important authors cover Rand and her works, as do popular study guides like CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. In "The Literary Encyclopedia" entry for Rand written in 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation." In 2019, Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize for "her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle- to lowbrow aesthetic preferences ... and philosophical strivings".
Objectivist movement.
After the closure of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the Objectivist movement continued in other forms. In the 1970s, Peikoff began delivering courses on Objectivism. In 1979, Peter Schwartz started a newsletter called "The Intellectual Activist", which Rand endorsed. She also endorsed "The Objectivist Forum", a bimonthly magazine founded by Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, which ran from 1980 to 1987.
In 1985, Peikoff worked with businessman Ed Snider to establish the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Rand's ideas and works. In 1990, after an ideological disagreement with Peikoff, David Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies, now known as The Atlas Society. In 2001, historian John McCaskey organized the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, which provides grants for scholarly work on Objectivism in academia.
Critical reception.
The first reviews Rand received were for "Night of January 16th". Reviews of the Broadway production were largely positive, but Rand considered even positive reviews to be embarrassing because of significant changes made to her script by the producer. Although Rand believed that her novel "We the Living" was not widely reviewed, over 200 publications published approximately 125 different reviews. Overall, they were more positive than those she received for her later work. Her novella "Anthem" received little review attention, both for its first publication in England and for subsequent re-issues.
Rand's first bestseller, "The Fountainhead", received far fewer reviews than "We the Living", and reviewers' opinions were mixed. Lorine Pruette's positive review in "The New York Times", which called the author "a writer of great power" who wrote "brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly", was one that Rand greatly appreciated. There were other positive reviews, but Rand dismissed most of them for either misunderstanding her message or for being in unimportant publications. Some negative reviews said the novel was too long; others called the characters unsympathetic and Rand's style "offensively pedestrian".
"Atlas Shrugged" was widely reviewed, and many of the reviews were strongly negative. "Atlas Shrugged" received positive reviews from a few publications, but Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs", with reviews including comments that it was "written out of hate" and showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". Whittaker Chambers wrote what was later called the novel's most "notorious" review for the conservative magazine "National Review". He accused Rand of supporting a godless system (which he related to that of the Soviets), claiming, "From almost any page of "Atlas Shrugged", a voice can be heard ... commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!.
Rand's nonfiction received far fewer reviews than her novels. The tenor of the criticism for her first nonfiction book, "For the New Intellectual", was similar to that for "Atlas Shrugged". Philosopher Sidney Hook likened her certainty to "the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union", and author Gore Vidal called her viewpoint "nearly perfect in its immorality". These reviews set the pattern for reaction to her ideas among liberal critics. Her subsequent books got progressively less review attention.
Popular interest.
With over 37 million copies sold , Rand's books continue to be read widely. A survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1991 asked club members to name the most influential book in their lives. Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was the second most popular choice, after the Bible. Although Rand's influence has been greatest in the United States, there has been international interest in her work.
Rand's contemporary admirers included fellow novelists, like Ira Levin, Kay Nolte Smith and L. Neil Smith; she has influenced later writers like Erika Holzer, Terry Goodkind, and comic book artist Steve Ditko. Rand provided a positive view of business and subsequently many business executives and entrepreneurs have admired and promoted her work. Businessmen such as John Allison of BB&T and Ed Snider of Comcast Spectacor have funded the promotion of Rand's ideas.
Television shows, movies, and video games have referred to Rand and her works. Throughout her life she was the subject of many articles in popular magazines, as well as book-length critiques by authors such as the psychologist Albert Ellis and Trinity Foundation president John W. Robbins. Rand or characters based on her figure prominently in novels by American authors, including Mary Gaitskill, Matt Ruff, Kay Nolte Smith, and Tobias Wolff. Nick Gillespie, former editor-in-chief of "Reason", remarked that, "Rand's is a tortured immortality, one in which she's as likely to be a punch line as a protagonist. Jibes at Rand as cold and inhuman run through the popular culture." Two movies have been made about Rand's life. A 1997 documentary film, "", was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. "The Passion of Ayn Rand", a 1999 television adaptation of the book of the same name, won several awards. Rand's image also appears on a 1999 U.S. postage stamp illustrated by artist Nick Gaetano.
Rand's works, most commonly "Anthem" or "The Fountainhead", are sometimes assigned as secondary school reading. Since 2002, the Ayn Rand Institute has provided free copies of Rand's novels to teachers who promise to include the books in their curriculum. The Institute had distributed 4.5 million copies in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2020. In 2017, Rand was added to the required reading list for the A Level Politics exam in the United Kingdom.
Political influence.
Although she rejected the labels "conservative" and "libertarian", Rand has had a continuing influence on right-wing politics and libertarianism. Rand is often considered one of the three most important women (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) in the early development of modern American libertarianism. David Nolan, one founder of the Libertarian Party, said that "without Ayn Rand, the libertarian movement would not exist". In his history of that movement, journalist Brian Doherty described her as "the most influential libertarian of the twentieth century to the public at large". Political scientist Andrew Koppelman called her "the most widely read libertarian". Historian Jennifer Burns referred to her as "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right".
The political figures who cite Rand as an influence are usually conservatives (often members of the Republican Party), despite Rand taking some atypical positions for a conservative, like being pro-choice and an atheist. She faced intense opposition from William F. Buckley Jr. and other contributors to the conservative "National Review" magazine, which published numerous criticisms of her writings and ideas. Nevertheless, a 1987 article in "The New York Times" referred to her as the Reagan administration's "novelist laureate". Republican congressmen and conservative pundits have acknowledged her influence on their lives and have recommended her novels. She has influenced some conservative politicians outside the U.S., such as Sajid Javid in the United Kingdom, Siv Jensen in Norway, and Ayelet Shaked in Israel.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 spurred renewed interest in her works, especially "Atlas Shrugged", which some saw as foreshadowing the crisis. Opinion articles compared real-world events with the novel's plot. Signs mentioning Rand and her fictional hero John Galt appeared at Tea Party protests. There was increased criticism of her ideas, especially from the political left. Critics blamed the economic crisis on her support of selfishness and free markets, particularly through her influence on Alan Greenspan. In 2015, Adam Weiner said that through Greenspan, "Rand had effectively chucked a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy". Lisa Duggan said that Rand's novels had "incalculable impact" in encouraging the spread of neoliberal political ideas. In 2021, Cass Sunstein said Rand's ideas could be seen in the tax and regulatory policies of the Trump administration, which he attributed to the "enduring influence" of Rand's fiction.
Academic reaction.
During Rand's lifetime, her work received little attention from academic scholars. Since her death, interest in her work has increased gradually. In 2009, historian Jennifer Burns identified "three overlapping waves" of scholarly interest in Rand, including "an explosion of scholarship" since 2000. As of that year, few universities included Rand or Objectivism as a philosophical specialty or research area, with many literature and philosophy departments dismissing her as a pop culture phenomenon rather than a subject for serious study. From 2002 to 2012, over 60 colleges and universities accepted grants from the charitable foundation of BB&T Corporation that required teaching Rand's ideas or works; in some cases, the grants were controversial or even rejected because of the requirement to teach about Rand.
In 2020, media critic Eric Burns said that, "Rand is surely the most engaging philosopher of my lifetime", but "nobody in the academe pays any attention to her, neither as an author nor a philosopher". That same year, the editor of a collection of critical essays about Rand said academics who disapproved of her ideas had long held "a stubborn resolve to ignore or ridicule" her work, but he believed more academic critics were engaging with her work in recent years.
To her ideas.
In 1967, John Hospers discussed Rand's ethical ideas in the second edition of his textbook, "An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis". That same year, Hazel Barnes included a chapter critiquing Objectivism in her book "An Existentialist Ethics". When the first full-length academic book about Rand's philosophy appeared in 1971, its author declared writing about Rand "a treacherous undertaking" that could lead to "guilt by association" for taking her seriously. A few articles about Rand's ideas appeared in academic journals before her death in 1982, many of them in "The Personalist". One of these was "On the Randian Argument" by libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, who criticized her meta-ethical arguments. Other philosophers, writing in the same publication, argued that Nozick misstated Rand's case. In an article responding to Nozick, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen defended her positions, but described her style as "literary, hyperbolic and emotional".
"The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand", a 1984 collection of essays about Objectivism edited by Den Uyl and Rasmussen, was the first academic book about Rand's ideas published after her death. In one essay, political writer Jack Wheeler wrote that despite "the incessant bombast and continuous venting of Randian rage", Rand's ethics are "a most immense achievement, the study of which is vastly more fruitful than any other in contemporary thought". In 1987, the Ayn Rand Society was founded as an affiliate of the American Philosophical Association.
In a 1995 entry about Rand in "Contemporary Women Philosophers", Jenny A. Heyl described a divergence in how different academic specialties viewed Rand. She said that Rand's philosophy "is regularly omitted from academic philosophy. Yet, throughout literary academia, Ayn Rand is considered a philosopher." Writing in the 1998 edition of the "Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy", political theorist Chandran Kukathas summarized the mainstream philosophical reception of her work in two parts. He said most commentators view her ethical argument as an unconvincing variant of Aristotle's ethics, and her political theory "is of little interest" because it is marred by an "ill-thought out and unsystematic" effort to reconcile her hostility to the state with her rejection of anarchism. "The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies", a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of Rand and her ideas, was established in 1999.
In a 2010 essay for the Cato Institute, Huemer argued very few people find Rand's ideas convincing, especially her ethics. He attributed the attention she receives to her being a "compelling writer", especially as a novelist, noting that "Atlas Shrugged" outsells Rand's non-fiction works and the works of other philosophers of classical liberalism. In 2012, the Pennsylvania State University Press agreed to take over publication of "The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies", and the University of Pittsburgh Press launched an "Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies" series based on the Society's proceedings. The Fall 2012 update to the entry about Rand in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" said that "only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously". That same year, political scientist Alan Wolfe dismissed Rand as a "nonperson" among academics, an attitude that writer Ben Murnane later described as "the traditional academic view" of Rand. Philosopher Skye C. Cleary wrote in a 2018 article for "Aeon" that, "Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It's trendy to scoff at any mention of her." However, Cleary said that because many people take Rand's ideas seriously, philosophers "need to treat the Ayn Rand phenomenon seriously" and provide refutations rather than ignoring her.
To her fiction.
Academic consideration of Rand as a literary figure during her life was even more limited than the discussion of her philosophy. Mimi Reisel Gladstein could not find any scholarly articles about Rand's novels when she began researching her in 1973, and only three such articles appeared during the rest of the 1970s. Since her death, scholars of English and American literature have continued largely to ignore her work, although attention to her literary work has increased since the 1990s. Several academic book series about important authors cover Rand and her works, as do popular study guides like CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. In "The Literary Encyclopedia" entry for Rand written in 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation." In 2019, Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize for "her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle- to lowbrow aesthetic preferences ... and philosophical strivings".
To her ideas.
In 1967, John Hospers discussed Rand's ethical ideas in the second edition of his textbook, "An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis". That same year, Hazel Barnes included a chapter critiquing Objectivism in her book "An Existentialist Ethics". When the first full-length academic book about Rand's philosophy appeared in 1971, its author declared writing about Rand "a treacherous undertaking" that could lead to "guilt by association" for taking her seriously. A few articles about Rand's ideas appeared in academic journals before her death in 1982, many of them in "The Personalist". One of these was "On the Randian Argument" by libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, who criticized her meta-ethical arguments. Other philosophers, writing in the same publication, argued that Nozick misstated Rand's case. In an article responding to Nozick, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen defended her positions, but described her style as "literary, hyperbolic and emotional".
"The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand", a 1984 collection of essays about Objectivism edited by Den Uyl and Rasmussen, was the first academic book about Rand's ideas published after her death. In one essay, political writer Jack Wheeler wrote that despite "the incessant bombast and continuous venting of Randian rage", Rand's ethics are "a most immense achievement, the study of which is vastly more fruitful than any other in contemporary thought". In 1987, the Ayn Rand Society was founded as an affiliate of the American Philosophical Association.
In a 1995 entry about Rand in "Contemporary Women Philosophers", Jenny A. Heyl described a divergence in how different academic specialties viewed Rand. She said that Rand's philosophy "is regularly omitted from academic philosophy. Yet, throughout literary academia, Ayn Rand is considered a philosopher." Writing in the 1998 edition of the "Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy", political theorist Chandran Kukathas summarized the mainstream philosophical reception of her work in two parts. He said most commentators view her ethical argument as an unconvincing variant of Aristotle's ethics, and her political theory "is of little interest" because it is marred by an "ill-thought out and unsystematic" effort to reconcile her hostility to the state with her rejection of anarchism. "The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies", a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of Rand and her ideas, was established in 1999.
In a 2010 essay for the Cato Institute, Huemer argued very few people find Rand's ideas convincing, especially her ethics. He attributed the attention she receives to her being a "compelling writer", especially as a novelist, noting that "Atlas Shrugged" outsells Rand's non-fiction works and the works of other philosophers of classical liberalism. In 2012, the Pennsylvania State University Press agreed to take over publication of "The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies", and the University of Pittsburgh Press launched an "Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies" series based on the Society's proceedings. The Fall 2012 update to the entry about Rand in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" said that "only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously". That same year, political scientist Alan Wolfe dismissed Rand as a "nonperson" among academics, an attitude that writer Ben Murnane later described as "the traditional academic view" of Rand. Philosopher Skye C. Cleary wrote in a 2018 article for "Aeon" that, "Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It's trendy to scoff at any mention of her." However, Cleary said that because many people take Rand's ideas seriously, philosophers "need to treat the Ayn Rand phenomenon seriously" and provide refutations rather than ignoring her.
To her fiction.
Academic consideration of Rand as a literary figure during her life was even more limited than the discussion of her philosophy. Mimi Reisel Gladstein could not find any scholarly articles about Rand's novels when she began researching her in 1973, and only three such articles appeared during the rest of the 1970s. Since her death, scholars of English and American literature have continued largely to ignore her work, although attention to her literary work has increased since the 1990s. Several academic book series about important authors cover Rand and her works, as do popular study guides like CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. In "The Literary Encyclopedia" entry for Rand written in 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation." In 2019, Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize for "her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle- to lowbrow aesthetic preferences ... and philosophical strivings".
Objectivist movement.
After the closure of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the Objectivist movement continued in other forms. In the 1970s, Peikoff began delivering courses on Objectivism. In 1979, Peter Schwartz started a newsletter called "The Intellectual Activist", which Rand endorsed. She also endorsed "The Objectivist Forum", a bimonthly magazine founded by Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, which ran from 1980 to 1987.
In 1985, Peikoff worked with businessman Ed Snider to establish the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Rand's ideas and works. In 1990, after an ideological disagreement with Peikoff, David Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies, now known as The Atlas Society. In 2001, historian John McCaskey organized the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, which provides grants for scholarly work on Objectivism in academia.
Selected works.
Fiction and drama:
Non-fiction:
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