Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum) was a Russian-American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, newspaper columnist, and philosopher, best known for her two bestselling novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), and for the philosophical system she developed, called Objectivism . The Fountainhead gave her widespread "mainstream" success and even acclaim, but Atlas Shrugged and her non-fiction writings on Objectivism made her a polarising political and cultural figure, even after her death at 77 in 1982. To some extent that remains true to this day - at least in the United States, where she remains a household name. Her cultural impact in other countries seems to be negligible; on the other hand her two main novels remain in print in the UK and can be found even in smaller bookshops. Life and work : Born in St Petersburg in 1905 in a Jewish family of upper-middle-class means - her father owned a small business - Rand's worldview was, by her o...
An international resource on Socionics, a theory of personality type.