The class quiz
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Ayn Rand (1905-82) was the pen name of Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Russian who visited the US in 1926 and decided to stay. She changed her name and became a novelist, best known for her books The Fountainhead (1943) – made into a Hollywood film starring Gary Cooper (as an architect modelled on Frank Lloyd Wright) and Patricia Neal – and, especially, the monumental Atlas Shrugged (1957), in which five heroic figures save the US from socialism. Latterly she became a philosopher, espousing what she called ‘objectivism’, which championed capitalism and the pre-eminence of the individual. As well as her work on several anti-Communist films and her novels, which were surprisingly readable laissez-faire polemics disguised as fiction, she supported Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous anti-Communist witch-hunt in the mid-1950s. The ‘Randian’ hero is always rich, intelligent, unencumbered by doubt; the villains are weak, pathetic, full of uncertainty, talentless and foolishly giving to charity and voicing socialist ideology.
