Playboy interview with Ayn Rand |
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--This interview was originally published in Playboy of March
1964 ...Ayn Rand was born to the family of a small businessman in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she lived through the Soviet Revolution. She attended the University of Leningrad, loathing communism and its philosophy. In 1926 she managed to leave the U.S.S.R., stayed for a few months with distant relatives in Chicago, then moved on to Hollywood. She had always wanted to be a writer. Since her command of English was somewhat less then adequate for writing fiction, she found a job preparing outlines for silent movies, as she went about mastering her new language. Between bouts of unemployment, she worked as a movie extra, waitress, newspaper subscription salesgirl and studio wardrobe-department clerk. Then, in 1936, she completed her first novel, We the Living -- an attack on totalitarianism, set in Soviet Russia -- which drew little notice. Two years later she finished Anthem, a short novel about a society in which the word "I" has been extirpated in favor of the collectivist "we." It was not until two years and twelve publishers' rejections later that her first commercially successful book, The Fountainhead, appeared; the story of an architect's battle for his own individuality, it became a nation best seller, and was later made into a movie. For nearly a decade after that, Miss Rand struggled to write Atlas Shrugged, which she views not merely as a novel, but as the crystallization of a philosophy aimed at nothing less than reversing the entire direction of change in America -- turning society toward a state of pure laissez-faire capitalism, even purer than that which existed during the nineteenth century. But her philosophy -- which she calls "Objectivism" -- encompasses more than economics or politics: primarily, it sets forth a new kind of ethics which she defines as a morality of rational self-interest... |