As a young woman, Rose was drawn to socialism. Then she travelled through Europe and the Middle East with the American Red Cross after the First World War, reporting on famine and devastation, and saw the Soviet Union for herself. She came back convinced that no planned system could replace the freedom of ordinary people to make their own choices.

She spent long stretches of the 1920s in Albania, and later worked closely with her mother to turn Laura’s memories of pioneer life into the Little House books. Many historians see her love of self-reliant, hardworking families in those stories.

From 1942 to 1945 she wrote a weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading Black newspapers in the United States, where she argued that individual freedom and equal rights belonged to everyone. She kept writing and travelling into old age, and reported from Vietnam at 78.

For 25 years, Paterson wrote a weekly books column for the New York Herald Tribune, signed simply “I.M.P.” She used it to talk about literature, and also to defend individual liberty at a time when that view had gone deeply out of fashion among the people she wrote for.

She also published eight novels before writing The God of the Machine, her great work of political philosophy. Ayn Rand admired it so much that she said it “could literally save the world.” Herbert Hoover read it and wrote her a letter of praise.

Paterson was famously sharp-tongued and independent. She hosted weekly gatherings in New York where young writers, Rand among them, came to argue about ideas. She refused to join movements or organizations, even ones that shared her views. She wanted to think for herself, and she did.

Rand arrived in New York with little money and very little English. She found work in Hollywood as an extra and a junior screenwriter, and spent the next years writing plays and novels about individuals who refuse to surrender their minds to the crowd.

The Fountainhead was turned down by a long list of publishers before it came out in 1943. It sold slowly at first, then spread mostly by word of mouth, and went on to sell millions of copies. Her later novel, Atlas Shrugged, became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Rand developed her own philosophy, which she called Objectivism, and she was openly critical of the libertarian movement that grew up after her. Yet her moral case for individual freedom drew countless readers to these ideas, which is why she is so often counted among its founders.