Ayn Rand's Real Name: Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum

Quick answer: Ayn Rand's documented original name is Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. Britannica lists that form as the original name and dates her birth to February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy independently uses Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum and the same date and city (Britannica; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Real name and early life

She is known professionally as Ayn Rand. Both sources agree on Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum and on a St. Petersburg birth on February 2, 1905 (the encyclopedia uses the day-month form "2 February 1905"). Britannica says her father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was a prosperous pharmacist, that she was the eldest of three children, and that after the Russian Revolution of 1917 her father's shop was confiscated. As a student at Leningrad State University she studied history, Britannica says, and after graduating in 1924 enrolled in the State Institute for Cinematography, hoping to become a screenwriter. The Stanford Encyclopedia independently describes a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, studies that included history at Petrograd State University, and later work at the Institute for Cinematography. Britannica says she arrived in the United States in 1926 and changed her name to Ayn Rand; the first name, it says, was inspired by a Finnish writer she never identified, and the surname she described as an abbreviation of Rosenbaum. The Stanford Encyclopedia independently notes the pen name and records that she also told the New York Evening Post in 1936 that "Rand" was an abbreviation of her Russian surname; it adds that she married the actor Frank O'Connor in 1929.

Career highlights

Britannica treats her as a Russian-born American writer whose novels promoting individualism and laissez-faire capitalism were commercially successful. Both sources discuss The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). The Stanford Encyclopedia also records the earlier novels We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938). Britannica's fact box lists those works as well, styling the first novel "We, the Living," with a comma. Both sources note the later philosophical label Objectivism. The Stanford Encyclopedia says that by 1958 her following was large enough for an official Objectivist movement formed in association with psychologist Nathaniel Branden.

Death

Britannica dates her death to March 6, 1982, in New York, New York, at age 77. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives the years 1905–1982 without a calendar day or place in the extract consulted.

Name notes for searchers

Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum is the documented original name in both sources. Ayn Rand is the adopted professional name. Searchers looking for the author of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged are usually aiming at the same person.