Alissa Rosenbaum was a young partisan of the February Revolution of 1917 and of the revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky. It "was the only time," she later said, when she "was synchronized with history." After the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 she began her long career of opposition to the expansive political state. Her father's business was nationalized, and the family fled to the Crimea in a futile attempt to escape from communism. There they lived as if "on a battlefield" from 1918 to 1921, when they returned to metropolitan Russia. Alissa attended Leningrad University; most of her course work was in history, but she received instruction in philosophy, as well. She was graduated in 1924.
Wanting to write, but knowing that she would be unable to survive in Soviet society as an articulate opponent of communism, Rosenbaum escaped to the United States in 1926. She changed her name to Ayn Rand, choosing those syllables because she liked their sound ("Ayn" is pronounced to rhyme with mine).
Rand traveled to Hollywood, where, failing to support herself by writing for the motion-picture industry, she worked as a waitress, envelope stuffer, wardrobe clerk, and movie extra. On the set of Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927) she met an actor, Charles Francis (Frank) O'Connor; they were married on 15 April 1929.
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