Week #1 Risk-taking Researcher (Julia C)

Anthem

Ayn Rand

Parts 1-2

Risk-taking Researcher

Ayn Rand, the author of the novel Anthem, was born in February 2, 1905 and died in March 6, 1982. She was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. Rand was born and educated in Russia and moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935-1936. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Later, she started to promote her philosophy by publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays. rand supported and believed reason as the only of getting knowledge and didn't believe in faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected altruism. In politics, she criticized and didn't approve of the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism. Instead she supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she said was the system based on recognizing individual rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. One of her early piece of writing is the novella, Anthem, which we are currently reading. Anthem shows a vision of a dystopian future world where totalitarian collectivism has elevated 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 initially could not find an American publisher. Her later success allowed her to get a revised version published in 1946, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies (Wikipedia). Rand's stories are full of drama and intrigue, portray businessmen, inventors, architects, workers and scientists as noble, passionate figures. To create her stories and characters, Rand would define the new ideas and principles that would guide her characters. For her, philosophy is not a subject, but a daily force that shapes individual lives and human history. You must have some view of the kind of world you live in to understand and deal with it. Rand called her philosophy "objectivism" or "a philosophy for living on Earth" (Ayn Rand). 
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