It is a story of the individual's struggle against collectivism, against the idea that s ociety has the right to direct each person's life for the benefit of all. She decided to take some time off and write a story that she had long had in mind-the story of Anthem. Her husband, Frank O'Connor, was working as an actor in summer stock, and she was planning her next novel.
The summer of that year found her living temporarily in Stony Creek, Connecticut. In 1937, when Anthem was written, no one could possibly have predicted that Ayn Rand would become one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century. The story, set in Russia, was highly critical of the socialist system of enforced "equality" and the book was published at the height of Russian socialism's popularity among leaders of American opinion. Her first novel, We The Living, appeared in 1936.īut there was a problem. In 1935 she enjoyed her first success: her play, Night of January 16th, was produced on the New York stage. She gradually perfected her English, making herself one of a small handful of creative writers who have mastered the language in their adulthood.
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She supported herself as a waitress, a movie extra, a clerk in a studio wardrobe department.
Hoping to write for film, she traveled to Hollywood, where she found that the studios had little interest in her work. The values at stake in Anthem are not merely those of the central character they are the professed values of an entire civilization-our own.
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To free her writing from all traceable associations with her former life, she invented for herself the name Ayn Rand and set out, like the hero of her story, to make a new life for herself, in freedom.
She escaped from Russia and, two weeks after her twenty-first birthday, arrived in the United States. Alyssa, whose ambition was to become a writer, knew that she could not survive in a country where free expression was prohibited. After communism came to power in 1917, her father's small business was confiscated, and the family endured years of suffering and danger. She was the daughter of a middle-class family. Then, like her hero, she proceeded to rename herself.Īlissa Rosenbaum, who became Ayn Rand, was born on February 2, 1905, in St. The author of Anthem made the same escape, at the same age. Equality 7-2521, the hero of Anthem, is twenty-one years old when he escapes to freedom from a totalitarian state.
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