The World's Heritage. The Best-selling Guide to the Most Extraordinary Places

She never returned to her country and never saw her family again. As if cutting a ravel of yarn, she thrust aside the past in no uncertain terms. Shortly after, she renamed herself, taking her surname from the typewriter she used-Remington Rand. БЂњAyn RandБЂ«was the name she gave herself, the name with which she was reborn in the New World. Rand was a passionate anticommunist, but, then, she was passionate about all her views. She married an actor named Charles Francis ц©OБЂ™Connor and wrote many low-budget Hollywood screenplays. Though her first semiautobiographical novel, We the Living, had attracted considerable attention, her real breakthrough came in 1943 with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead, which took her seven years to write. Her magnum opus was Atlas Shrugged, a science-fiction romance and a novel of ideas. It was here that she introduced what she saw as a new moral philosophy-the morality of rational self-interest. Not a great fan of Kant, she called him БЂњthe most evil man in mankindБЂ™s history.БЂ«Her response to those who accused her of caricaturizing the fountainhead of Western philosophy was even harsher: БЂњI didnБЂ™t caricature Kant. Nobody can do that. He did it himself.БЂ«In time her name became synonymous with individualism, capitalism and rationalism ...»