After the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Ayn Rand realized that she would have to identify the philosophy that made her heroes possible. She termed this philosophy Objectivism and described it as "a philosophy for living on earth." Rand offered private courses on both fiction and nonfiction writing and, in 1958, helped form an institute to teach her philosophy. For the remaining years of her life, Rand devoted herself to nonfiction writing, penning and editing a number of articles for her periodicals. These articles later appeared in numerous philosophic collections and dealt with topics including ethics (The Virtue of Selfishness), politics (Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal), aesthetics (The Romantic Manifesto), and the theory of knowledge (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology). At the time of her death in 1982, Rand was working on a television miniseries of Atlas Shrugged.
A controversial novelist and philosopher — especially in academic circles — Ayn Rand attained widespread recognition, as indicated by a 1991 joint survey by The Library of Congress and The Book-of-the-Month Club, which placed Atlas Shrugged as second only to the Bible as the most influential book among American readers. The Ayn Rand Society (a subgroup of the American Philosophical Association), an Ayn Rand first-class postage stamp (issued by The U.S. Postal Service in 1999), and an Academy Award-nominated documentary about her life (Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, 1997) also serve as proof of her influence. The Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, California, was established in 1985 to increase the awareness of the existence and content of Ayn Rand's philosophy.
