Died of heart failure at her Manhattan home; buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, beside her husband Frank O'Connor.
Ayn Rand died of heart failure on March 6, 1982, at her home in New York City, at the age of 77. By this time she had long since ceased writing fiction, having devoted the final decades of her life to nonfiction essays, public lectures, and the ongoing development and defense of her philosophy of Objectivism through outlets such as The Objectivist Newsletter and later The Ayn Rand Letter.
She was predeceased by her husband of exactly fifty years, Frank O'Connor, who died in 1979. Rand was buried beside him at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. At her funeral, a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign — a recurring symbol in her philosophy representing productive achievement and free trade — was placed near her casket, a detail that has since become an emblematic and often-cited image summarizing her uncompromising devotion to capitalist ideals.
Rand's death marked the close of a literary and philosophical career that had begun with her emigration from Soviet Russia in 1926. In the decades following her passing, her influence has, if anything, grown: her novels continue to sell in the millions annually, the Ayn Rand Institute was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas, and her work remains a touchstone in American political, economic, and cultural debates, cited by figures across the ideological spectrum from business leaders to politicians.
She remains one of the most widely read and controversial novelist-philosophers of the twentieth century.