It never came.  But suffocating under the totalitarian regime of the Communists, wanting desperately to write the kind of novels which would never be permitted in the Soviet Union -- stories which dramatized her concept of the highest human potential -- Rand was obsessed with the desire to break free. Having fallen in love with America through American movies, captivated by the gaiety and no-holds-barred sense of life she saw on the screen in Leningrad, she was determined to live in what she regarded as her spiritual homeland.

She was twenty-one years old when she achieved her goal. Her assimilated Jewish family lived as part of Russia's small and elitist middle class, where her father owned a pharmacy. Through the intercession of relatives in Chicago, she was able to obtain a six-month visa for the United States and a Russian passport. It was her passport to freedom. She later told a friend that she arrived in this country with three things: fifty dollars, a battered typewriter, and her vision of America.