Today’s posting is called “One Hundred Years of Ayn Rand” – not because it takes a hundred years to plow through one of Rand’s gargantuan novels, but because 2005 is the centenary of the author’s birth.

Rand’s “jackbooted individualism” (to borrow a phrase from William F. Buckley) has always made her a controversial figure. Yet her novels are still in print, and people – young people in particular – still find them absorbing. Not long ago, Barbara Brandon’s excellent biography, “The Passion of Ayn Rand” was made into an equally excellent film starring Helen Mirren.

It was reading the Brandon biography that made me sympathetic to Ayn Rand.

Born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rand was still a girl in the 1920s when leftist intellectuals from the West were visiting the new Soviet Union and writing home glowing reports about the “workers’ paradise” being created there. Rand, who knew from brutal experience what this “paradise” was really like, utterly rejected communism and fled to the capitalist paradise she expected to find in the United States.

She was disappointed. Not only were many American intellectuals enamored of the Soviet experiment, but the Great Depression, and the New Deal which followed, made her fear the creation of socialist state in the U.S., with all the attendant evils she thought she had left behind in Russia.

So little Alice Rosenbaum, an unknown, impoverished immigrant, fought back. Her weapons were her hard-won mastery of the English language and the Remington Rand typewriter from which she took her literary name. In string of novels, “Anthem,” “The Fountainhead,” and “Atlas Shrugged,” she argued fiercely for the virtues of capitalism and the untrammeled freedom of the individual.

In a way, all her novels sprang from a single experience in her Russian childhood. Her father, a self-made man who owned a small chemist’s shop, saw the business he had sweated to build ruthlessly expropriated by Bolshevik revolutionaries. In fury, the doughty capitalist went on strike. He refused to work for the new regime – even though he and his family nearly starved as a result.

So if Rand was strident, if she carried her philosophy of individualism to grotesque extremes, there was a reason for it. She had seen what happened when the individual was forced to live “for the common good,” and she was she was determined to sound a warning against all forms of collectivism. If she had to shout to make herself heard, very well – she would shout.

She maintained the shrill decibel level to the end of her life, but that did not prevent people from wanting to hear her.

In 1974, she was invited to address the graduating class of West Point. Her topic, “Philosophy: Who Needs It” was blunt, as was the gist of her message: Everyone needs a philosophy. Either you develop your own philosophy through a conscious, disciplined, rational process of thought or you “let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears …”

The year 1974 was the end of the Vietnam era. The nation’s military was widely held in low esteem. Returning veterans were spat upon. Once again, Rand bucked the intellectual tide by concluding her speech with a warm expression of gratitude for the young men before her who were embarking on a military career.

She said: “Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and the supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name and in the name of many people who think as I do, I want to say, to all the men of West Point, past, present and future: Thank you.”

With that, she snapped a crisp military salute. The effect was electrifying. The graduates leaped to their feet as a single man and cheered her to the echo.

Say what you will about the lady, she had brains, she had integrity – and she had guts. Happy 100, Ayn.