Ayn Rand
Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on January 20 (Russian Old Style), 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, later Alice O’Connor (an Americanized married name), Ayn Rand became a disruptive force of nature in literature and philosophy by writing plays, novels, essays, economic and philosophical treatises, and establishing herself as a commentator on the society in the mid-20th Century.
Having cut a larger-than-life figure during her lifetime, Rand and her writings have not faded away since her death in 1982. Aspects of her stated philosophy, as inconsistent or idiosyncratic as it may be, have been adopted and proclaimed by a heterogeneous assembly of groups. Rand herself would have been delighted and appalled by the attention and the creative straying from the ideas in her works. She did not suffer dissent graciously, considering how much she glorified it, but that too is an path of interest for some readers of her books. There is an irony that the founder of the Objectivist movement/school/philosophy seems to generate passions for and against her that are anything but objective or rational.
At any rate, I have sold Ayn Rand steadily and consistently since opening Whistlestop in 1985. I have sold her books to True Believers and to skeptics and to the curious. I provide this page in appreciation of her ability to unsettle readers to this day.
The Virtue of Selfishness
The Virtue of Selfishness
A collection of essays that sets forth the moral principles of Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s controversial, groundbreaking philosophy.
Since their initial publication, Rand’s fictional works—Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged—have had a major impact on the intellectual scene. The underlying theme of her famous novels is her philosophy, a new morality—the ethics of rational self-interest—that offers a robust challenge to altruist-collectivist thought.
Known as Objectivism, her divisive philosophy holds human life—the life proper to a rational being—as the standard of moral values and regards altruism as incompatible with man’s nature. In this series of essays, Rand asks why man needs morality in the first place, and arrives at an answer that redefines a new code of ethics based on the virtue of selfishness.
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