Caty Cleary
Mrs. Johnson
10th Grade Honors Literature
6 December 2014
Ayn Rand’s life influence on her writing Anthem
From her traumatic experiences of growing up during the Russian revolution Ayn Rand saw how communism oppressed the brightest and most creative thinkers and was able to communicate the basic flaws in that system. (Publishers Weekly) Out of her life living in America Ayn Rand learned to make parallels to our American leaders and by travelling to it she identified with the differences amongst the policies of individual rights between the two countries. In Anthem Ayn Rand’s writing was influenced by not only her life growing up in Soviet Russia but her life immigrating into and living in America as well.
Ayn rand’s life in soviet Russia was influential to her writing it because it filled her with the aspiration to live in a better place. One article states that for Rand, life in communist Russia was “dreary” and the future held little hope. Rand grew up wanting to write about the world as it could be and to show life as she felt it was intended to be lived. (Stetco) Ayn Rand’s Anthem is about the main character, Equality 7-2521’s, journey to find a new world, a new world that is a better…show more content… Equality 7-2521 explains his new self, Prometheus, “I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them… I am done with the creed of corruption. I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, of falsehood and shame.” (Rand 96-97) For the first time, Equality 7-2521 can express his identity as an individual in language. America’s contrast of human rights to soviet Russia’s rights is identical to Equality 7-2521’s life outside the brother hood in contrast to when he was with the brothers. Rand’s new familiarity of human rights gave her the ideas of how an ideal life, the thing Equality 7-2521 is searching for, would