Ayn Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her family was relatively wealthy; Rand's father was a self-made man who owned a pharmacy. According to her biographers, Rand was a precocious child who spent a lot of time among adults, gathering information about the world around her.
At the age of nine, she had already developed a strong fascination about the battle between good and evil, as well as her notion of the characteristics of the ideal man.
"Intelligence, independence, [and] courage" characterize "the heroic man," as she described him to her biographer Barbara Branden. Rand later re-created this model in many of her fictional characters, including the mysterious John Galt, protagonist of Atlas Shrugged.
Rand's keen awareness of her ideological and political surroundings easily detected the.....
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