Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg (1905), watched the Russian Revolution confiscate her father’s pharmacy, emigrated to the US in 1926 and reinvented herself as Ayn Rand, Hollywood screenwriter first, philosopher-novelist after. Her two big novels, El manantial and La rebelión de Atlas, carry her philosophy, Objectivism: reason as the only absolute, rational egoism as ethics, laissez-faire capitalism as the system that follows. Few writers produce devotion and allergy in such equal measure; half a century after her death (1982) she is still a founding reference of American libertarianism.