Photo portrait credited to "Talbot" (though not on original dust jacket). Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. · Public domain

Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, she left Soviet Russia in 1926 and, in the United States, built a literary career around a philosophy she called Objectivism — reason over faith, self-interest over altruism, laissez-faire capitalism as the only system consistent with individual rights. The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) made her a bestseller if never a critical favorite; she spent her later decades writing essays and periodicals to defend the ideas rather than fiction to dramatize them.