Ayn Rand (St. Petersburg, 1905; New York, 1982) was a writer and philosopher born in Russia and naturalized American. After publishing her first two novels, We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938), she achieved success with The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), her magnum opus. In these works, Rand developed her philosophy, known as Objectivism, in which she concretizes her original vision of man as «a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute».
Later, she would establish the theoretical foundations of this philosophy in her non-fiction books: Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979), The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), and The Romantic Manifesto (1969).
Her legacy continues to be enormously influential among conservatives and libertarians, both in the United States and around the world, because it directly confronts the acquired cultural inertia, challenging the axis «mysticism-altruism-collectivism» and replacing it with a philosophy based on: «reason-selfishness-capitalism».
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