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We the Living is the debut novel by Ayn Rand. This work of nonfiction was Rand’s first statement against communism. Summary of the Book This title depicts the story of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Kira Argounova, the younger daughter of a bourgeois family, is the protagonist of the story. It is her battle against the land, as an aftermath of the ever-lasting effect of the Russian Revolution, along with two other individuals who ask for the right to live according to their own terms, and follow their own sources of pleasure. We the Living expresses a deep concern for the people who encounter horrors just for survival in a totalitarian state. It was also adapted into a two-fold movie, Noi Vivi and Addio, Kira in the year 1942. About Ayn Rand Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer, novelist, and philosopher who first came up with the philosophical system called Objectivism. She was born in Russia in 1905. She admitted to have started penning screenplays since she was eight years old, as she lacked any interest in going to school. She also started writing novels when she was only ten. When Rand was in high school, she became a self-proclaimed atheist and asserted that she believed in the significance of reason more than anything else. After high school, she came back to Saint Petersburg, her birth place, and joined the Petrograd State University. She studied social pedagogy and history there. Ayn also studied at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad for a year, after which she evolved her philosophy, Objectivism. She did so not only through her non-fiction writing, but also by giving lectures at several universities like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and MIT. She received an honorary doctorate from the Lewis & Clark College in 1963. Rand passed away due to heart failure in 1982 in New York City. Some of her other works are The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Night of January 16th, and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.