Required reading: Ayn Rand

The Republican candidate Mitt Romney has picked the Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate for this year's presidential election. The 42-year-old chair of the House Budget Committee is a darling of the popular right-wing Tea Party movement and, we're told, a devotee of the Russian-American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand.

Indeed, commentators in the US have said that the 2012 election can best be seen as a battle between Obama's essentially Rooseveltian vision of America's future, and Romney/Ryan's Randian vision. So just who was Ayn Rand and how have her ideas - never especially popular in her own lifetime - come to be so influential?

Rand was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, the daughter of a St Petersberg pharmacist, in 1905. Go to Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C Heller (Anchor, Dh104) to see how the 1917 Bolshevik revolution - in which her father's pharmacy was confiscated - forged a deep-rooted anti-state, libertarian worldview in the young Rosenbaum.

Rand - she adopted the pen name in her early 20s - arrived in New York in 1925, reportedly crying "tears of splendour" when she first saw the Manhattan skyline. Early work as a Hollywood screenwriter was not successful. But in 1943 Rand published The Fountainhead (Penguin, Dh58), a philosophical novel about a young architect who struggles against tradition.

That book became a worldwide success, and was followed in 1957 by Atlas Shrugged (Penguin, Dh58), the book that Rand's followers call her masterpiece. The novel set out what Rand called her Objectivist philosophy: fierce individualism, an aversion of government and an insistence on the primacy of reason above faith.

Rand's novels were not received well by critics. But slowly - aided by a circle of acolytes that included the future chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, - her ideas seeped into the American consciousness. But read Goddess of the Market (OUP USA, Dh98), by Jennifer Burns, to learn how in 1991, when the American Library of Congress conducted a survey to find the most influential book, Atlas Shrugged came second, after the Bible.