One of the twentieth century's best known novelists and philosophers, Ayn Rand (1905–1982), who was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia on February 2, and died in New York City on March 6, celebrated the individual in dramatic stories with unconventional characters and plots. The heroes of her four novels are engineers, scientists, architects, and industrialists. Her philosophy, which she called Objectivism, champions the rational productive individual.

In 1936, ten years after her arrival in the United States, Rand published her first novel, We the Living. Set in Russia shortly after the communist revolution of 1917, it tells the story of Kira Argounova, a young woman who wants to become an engineer and build bridges, and her struggle to live in a collectivist society at war with the individual.

Rand's second major publication, the novelette Anthem, published in 1938, is set in a bleak future in which freedom and individualism have been eliminated...