MARINA DEL REY, CA -- February 2 marks the 95th birthday of the late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, author of the classic novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
 
      Highlights of Ayn Rand's life and career:

Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
 
Saw the first saber slash of the February 1917 Revolution, survived the ensuing Russian Civil War, and experienced the first bloody years of the Soviet state.
 
Immigrated to the U.S. in 1926, where her first American job was as an extra in Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings.
 
The Fountainhead (1943), the story of an innovative architect and his battle against a tradition-worshipping society, became a publishing phenomenon as a word-of-mouth bestseller.
 
Her masterwork Atlas Shrugged (1957), a philosophical mystery story "not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder -- and rebirth -- of man's spirit," was named, in a 1991 Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress survey, the second most influential book in Americans' lives after the Bible.
 
Ayn Rand died in New York on March 6, 1982.
 
Nearly 18 years after her death, all of Ayn Rand's fiction and non-fiction books remain in print, selling more than 400,000 copies per year.