The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
Summary
Howard Roark, an architect trained in the modernist tradition, is expelled from architecture school for refusing to design in the historical styles his professors demand, and later, when his own practice fails for want of clients willing to build his way, takes work in a Connecticut granite quarry rather than compromise his vision to win commissions. Rand sets him against Peter Keating, a talented but hollow architect who succeeds by imitation and social climbing, and against Ellsworth Toohey, a newspaper critic who champions collectivist causes while working, patiently and deliberately, to destroy any architect, Roark most of all, who refuses to build for anyone's approval but his own. Roark eventually designs a public housing project called Cortlandt for the failing Keating, on the condition that it be built exactly to his plans and with his name kept off it entirely; when the finished building is altered without his consent, Roark dynamites it before it can open. At his trial for the destruction, he delivers a lengthy courtroom speech defending the individual creator against every form of secondhand thinking, and the jury acquits him. Gail Wynand, a newspaper magnate who has become Roark's closest ally and patron, is broken by the public backlash to his support and ultimately commissions Roark to design the skyscraper that will bear his name, even as his own paper turns against him. The novel ends with Dominique Francon, Roark's lover through most of the book's turns, climbing the unfinished steel frame of the Wynand Building to meet him at its highest point.
Rand writes in long, declarative speeches as much as in scenes, and Roark's own courtroom address runs for pages without interruption, laying out her developing philosophy of individualism directly rather than through implication. The novel reads slowly at times, weighed down by its own argument, and readers divide sharply over whether that directness is the book's real strength or its biggest flaw; almost nobody who finishes it comes away neutral about Roark.
Twelve publishers rejected the manuscript before editor Archibald Ogden at Bobbs Merrill fought to acquire it, reportedly telegramming his bosses that if this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you. Rand had worked on the novel for roughly seven years, under the working title Second Hand Lives before settling on The Fountainhead.
Historical Context & Significance
Rand, a naturalized American citizen since 1931, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when Bobbs Merrill published The Fountainhead in May 1943, but no prize came for it. The 1944 Pulitzer went to Martin Flavin's Journey in the Dark, a now largely forgotten novel of a Midwestern businessman, over a book that would go on to sell many times its readership.
Reviews split sharply on release. Lorine Pruette, writing in The New York Times, called it a hymn in praise of the individual and said Rand wrote brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly, while a second Times critic, Orville Prescott, dismissed the same novel as disastrous, built from a crude cast of characters. Sales were slow until word of mouth built through late 1943, and the book had sold over 700,000 hardcover copies by 1956 and more than ten million worldwide by 2023. King Vidor's 1949 film, with Gary Cooper as Roark and Patricia Neal as Dominique, was panned on release by The New York Times, Variety, and Time alike, yet still helped push the novel further onto bestseller lists.