Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a Jewish middle-class family.
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905 (New Style; January 20, Old Style) in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy and Anna Rosenbaum, a prosperous Jewish family. Her father was a pharmacist and businessman.
Rand's childhood coincided with immense political upheaval, including the 1905 Revolution and, more decisively, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which saw her father's pharmacy business confiscated by the new communist government. This early, direct experience of state seizure of property and the suppression of individual initiative would become a formative influence on the political and philosophical convictions she developed in adulthood.
She taught herself to read at age six and displayed a precocious interest in literature and philosophy, eventually studying history, philosophy, and law at Petrograd State University. Her Russian upbringing, and her opposition to the collectivism she witnessed under Soviet rule, laid the intellectual foundation for the philosophy of Objectivism she would later articulate through her fiction and nonfiction in the United States.
Her birth in Tsarist Russia and subsequent emigration make her one of the most notable Russian-American writers, and this origin is essential context for understanding her fierce advocacy of individualism and capitalism.
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