After struggling for several years at various non-writing jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO film studio, Rand sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios in 1932. Rand saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood in 1934 and then on Broadway in 1935. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1933. The most autobiographical of Rand’s novels, We the Living, was rejected as too anti-Communist and wasn’t published in the United States until 1936. In 1937, Rand devoted a few weeks to write her novella Anthem, which was soon published in England but was not published in the United States until 1947, ten years later.
Although positively reviewed, neither We the Living nor Anthem garnered high sales. Not until the publication of The Fountainhead did Ayn Rand achieve fame. Rand began writing The Fountainhead in 1935, taking seven years to complete the book. In the hero of The Fountainhead, architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man “as he could be and ought to be.” The Fountainhead was rejected by 12 publishers but finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill. Although published in 1943, The Fountainhead made history by becoming a bestseller two years later, through word-of-mouth, and it gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.
Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but war-timewartime restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part-time as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis, Rand wrote such scripts as Love Letters and You Came Along, and she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951, Rand permanently moved back to New York City and devoted herself full-time to the completion of the novel Atlas Shrugged. Despite extremely negative reviews, Atlas Shrugged quickly became a bestseller.
