"Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution.... The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off." (Ayn Rand)

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to Jewish parents on February 2, 1905, as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, and she lived through the turbulence and transformation of early 20th-century Russia. Her first exposure to reading came after she taught herself how to read at age six, and she decided at nine years old to become a writer after a chance encounter with the books of Victor Hugo, the writer she admired most.

The seminal events in the young would-be writer's life came just a few years later, when she witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution and the ultimate Communist victory as a teenager. Rand's experience with the maelstrom of this revolutionary zeal and cultural breakdown greatly contributed to the formation of Rand's philosophy of objectivism, individualism, and antireligious ideas. During her last year of high school, she was introduced to the history of the United States and immediately decided to make America her model of what an ideal society should look like. Rand came to the United States as a young woman for a visit in 1925, and, as fate would have it, she never returned to Russia.

In middle age Rand continued trying to write in some capacity as a profession, but she had also formed her personal philosophy of integrating ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sexuality into what came to be called objectivism, or, as she called it, "a philosophy for living on earth".