Overview and Analysis of Writing from the Subconscious -The Art of Fiction by Ayn Rand

Whenever I bring up the name Ayn Rand, as I converse with various bodies of intelligentsia, all eyebrows head north. Nobody ever

wants to discuss her work. They say:

"Ayn Rand? Whoa! She's crazy, she's out there."

Who is Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand came into this world on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She came to our planet with the unconscious intention

to improve the lot of humankind with her screenplays, novels, and philosophy of Objectivism.

Teaching herself to read at age six, she decides to become a career novelist at age nine.

Thinking of herself as a European writer, she rejects the mysticism and collectivism of the Soviet Russian culture and embraces the

likes of a Victor Hugo as her most admired writer.

With her family, she escapes to Crimea to ride out the Bolshevik furies, there she finishes High School. Her father, a pharmacist loses

his business and the family teeters on the borders of starvation.

In her final year, she's introduced to American History and embraced the aspect of freedom that she will seek after going to Petrograd

to study screenwriting.

She uses movies from the West, as an escape from the harshness of the infantile Soviet regime which may have whetted her appetite

for writing for the movies.

In late 1925, she obtains permission to leave Russia with no intentions to ever return. She arrives in New York, and then goes to

Chicago to stay with relatives until she gets a visa extension, then she moves straight to Hollywood to try her luck in the movies.

Apparently this young lady is quite a charmer. She simply hangs around the entrance to Cecil B. DeMille's studio, as he's filming King

of Kings. One morning he stops to pick her up as he's on the way into the compound.

He hires her first as an extra and then as a script reader. She meets and marries Frank O'Conner in 1929. They remain together until

his death fifty years later.

So Ayn Rand appears to be a woman of destiny. She comes to the States and has her way, a break here, a break there. Lucky for us.

After many false starts in non writing careers, she finally sells her first screenplay to Universal Pictures in 1932 and her first stage play,