Ayn Rand

Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, she left for the United States in 1926 and rechristened herself Ayn Rand. Two early novels went nowhere, but The Fountainhead in 1943 made her famous. Atlas Shrugged followed in 1957 and became her best-selling work. After that she abandoned fiction and spent the next quarter-century writing essays and running her own periodicals to promote Objectivism - the system she'd named, which championed reason over faith, egoism over altruism, and laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral framework. She condemned religion, most philosophers, and the initiation of force; she also rejected the libertarians who tried to claim her, calling their ideas anarchism. Literary critics soured on her later work, and academic philosophy largely dismissed her as polemical and methodologically loose. She died in 1982, leaving a movement that still circulates her ideas and a political influence that cuts across conservatives and right-libertarians, however much she'd criticized both.