Yale University Press
Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success
Key Metrics
- Alexandra Popoff
- Yale University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780300253214
- -
- -
- Biography & Autobiography > Literary Figures
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Biographer Alexandra Popoff traces the life and creative achievement of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), one of America's most provocative writers and whose best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have enjoyed impressive longevity. Born into a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Rand (then Alisa Rosenbaum) lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, and the onset of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships--experiences that made her profoundly anticommunist. When in 1926 Rand escaped from Stalinist Russia to realize her talent in America, she was also determined to expose the Communist system.
Through her apprenticeship in Hollywood, where she worked as a scriptwriter, to her first anti-Communist novel, We the Living, Rand doggedly pursued her goal, battling the Soviet belief system, along with its precepts of collectivism and statism. She defended American capitalism, individualism, prosperity, and creativity; her literary heroes were talented high achievers. While Marx had declared war on capitalism and prophesied the triumph of the proletariat, Rand, whose family was dispossessed by the Bolsheviks, glorified the wealth-creator and held the masses in contempt. In Atlas Shrugged, her most controversial novel, she promoted laissez-faire capitalism and the morality of rational self-interest. She envisaged apocalypse in America if it followed the socialist path.
Author Bio
I am a former journalist, an expert in Russian literature and culture, and a biographer. My current project is a concise interpretive biography of Ayn Rand, commissioned by Yale University Press (Jewish Lives).
I began my career as a journalist working in Moscow. As a 1991 Alfred Friendly Press Fellow I wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer and its Sunday magazine. Over the years I contributed book reviews and essays to The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Literary Hub, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and other newspapers and outlets.
I was educated in Moscow’s Gorky Literary Institute, the University of Toronto, and the University of Saskatchewan where I also taught Russian literature and history. I live in Canada.
Source: russianliteratureandbiography.com
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