Arrived in New York City by ship from Russia, intending to become a screenwriter, before moving on to Chicago and then Hollywood.
On February 19, 1926, the young Alisa Rosenbaum arrived in New York City aboard a ship, having secured a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, ostensibly for a temporary stay. In reality, she had no intention of returning to the Soviet Union, having witnessed firsthand the destruction of civil liberties and private enterprise under Bolshevik rule.
After a brief period living with relatives in Chicago, she made her way to Hollywood, California, determined to break into the film industry as a screenwriter, adopting the pen name Ayn Rand to protect her family still living in the USSR from potential repercussions associated with her defection.
This arrival marked the beginning of one of the most consequential immigrant literary careers in American history. Rand would go on to become one of the best-selling and most polarizing novelist-philosophers of the twentieth century, and her journey from Soviet Russia to the United States directly informed the fierce individualism and anti-collectivist themes that permeate her later work, including The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Her emigration is emblematic of the broader wave of Russian émigrés fleeing Soviet repression in the 1920s, many of whom went on to make significant contributions to American arts, science, and letters.