Today we're featuring our favorite immigrant of them all, Ayn Rand.  Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, has had a tremendous impact on my life and in fact, saved it!  If you're curious at all about her ideas or want to learn about individual rights, I encourage you to ignore the rumors, read her ideas, then judge for yourself.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905.  She graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924 and in late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia to visit relatives in America.  From her biography page at The Ayn Rand Institute:

Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.

From Wikipedia:

[Rand] worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

You can click on the "Objectivism" tab at the top of this blog to obtain more information about Rand and her philosophy.