Alice O'Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is renowned for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, and her best-known work, the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. Although Rand opposed libertarianism, viewing it as anarchism, she is often associated with the modern libertarian movement. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals.

Rand's fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics, and although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her philosophy due to her polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Her writings have influenced some libertarians and conservatives politically. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.