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found a publishing company that was enthusiastic about bringing out The Fountainhead but refused to pay the author an advance on royalties until the novel was completed. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., one of New York’s best and most reputable firms. Rand’s editor would be the founder’s stylish wife, Blanche Knopf, whom Rand later came to think of as “a phony.” Even without payment, there was both promise and protection in consigning her unfinished book to a well-regarded publisher. On June 27, 1938, the thirty-three-year-old novelist and playwright signed a contract with Knopf. Blanche Knopf gave her a year to finish.

FIVE

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

1936–1941

I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great their need. I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.

—The Fountainhead, 1943

The story of The Fountainhead, Rand once explained, is the story of how a moral man can live in a corrupt society.

Howard Roark is The Fountainhead’s moral man, of course, and also Ayn Rand’s first full portrait of an individualist hero. By vocation, he is a gifted young architect beginning his career. He wants to create bold new buildings, but he is surrounded by frightened conformists and envious schemers who conspire to stop him. When he persists, his most relentless enemy, Ellsworth M. Toohey, an architecture critic and the novel’s archvillain, tries to destroy him. But Roark prevails. He takes his case for the inalienable rights of the creative individual into court, where a jury of twelve thinking Americans takes his side. He goes on to design and erect the most original skyscraper in New York. As the novel closes, the flame-haired hero perches atop the building’s pinnacle, the world—and his beautiful new wife—at his feet.

The first and last words of The Fountainhead are “Howard Roark,” and Howard Roark is the novel’s embodied message. In the opening scene, the reader meets him as a gaunt nineteen-year-old, standing naked on the edge of a cliff, high above a lake, with his hair—“neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind”—blowing in the wind. He laughs, just as Rand remembered Cyrus laughing in his cage, mocking his enemies. He has been expelled that morning from the architectural school of the prestigious Stanton Institute of Technology. His offense: refusing to follow the school curriculum and spend months designing Tudor-style chapels and Renaissance villas. He has been drawing his own unprecedented buildings. His defiant laughter echoes from the rocks that surround him as he dives into the lake. These rocks are there for him, he thinks: “waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.” Who will let you design buildings without an architectural degree? the dean asks him in an exit interview. “Who will stop me?” he asks in return.

In one form or another, Ayn Rand had been daydreaming about Roark all her life. In figure, he is tall, thin to the point of gauntness, and almost always rigid with creative tension, although in repose he can be as supple as a cat. He possesses Cyrus’s moral certainty, self-confidence, and even insolence. Like Zarathustra, he welcomes difficulties that propel him beyond ordinary, drab humanity to the formation of new values. Like Enjolras, he is single-minded in pursuit of his goal. He differs from Leo Kovalensky in that nothing can shake his self-esteem, and from Andrei Taganov in that he has no desire to convert others to his creed. He would “walk over corpses” to be an architect, one of the characters says about him. No matter what inducements or penalties he faces he won’t compromise his architectural vision by a single pilaster. He is not afraid of disappointment or of pain. In her notes, Rand calls him “the noble soul par excellence,” paying homage to Nietzsche’s definition of a hero as “a soul