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By Root 1642 0

style, his emphasis on “Truth in Architecture,” his contempt for imitation and mediocrity, his transcendent indifference to clients’ good opinion, and even his famous “temple to man,” turning Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, into Roark’s Stoddard Temple in New York. Although Rand would later deny it, whole scenes from the novel are modified from or inspired by Wright’s account of his life. Roark’s rebellion against the dean of Stanton, for example, echoes the young Wright’s argument with his patron, his uncle Dan, against learning to work in traditional styles. A Mr. Austin is an early admirer of the fledgling Wright; Roark’s first client is named Austin Heller. (At one point in her notes, Rand substitutes the name of H. L. Mencken for that of Heller, suggesting that he was another model for the civil-libertarian Austin Heller.) Wright describes the nights he spent in a wooden shanty he constructed while supervising the creation of a nude female sculpture for his Midway Gardens project; Roark stays late into the night in a shack on the grounds of the Stoddard Temple while sculptor Steven Mallory creates a magnificent nude statue of Dominique Francon.

Twice Rand wrote to the curmudgeonly old midwesterner, asking to interview him. Her first letter was answered, “Dear Mr. Rand,” by a secretary who explained that Mr. Wright was traveling; in fact, Wright was in the midst of planning Taliesin West, his retreat in Arizona. In the fall of 1938, she arranged to be introduced to him after a lecture he gave at the National Association of Real Estate Boards in New York. “I spent three hundred and fifty dollars out of my savings to buy a black velvet dress and shoes and a cape, everything to match, at [the expensive Fifth Avenue department store] Bonwit Teller, which I had never entered before,” she later told a friend. “I felt this would be an unrepeatable occasion, because I was to meet a man who was really great.” According to Wright’s biographer, he felt no immediate rapport with her and was suspicious of her intentions. Still, in November 1938 she wrote again, enclosing a draft of the first three chapters of the novel. He replied that “no man named ‘Roark’ with flaming red hair” could possibly be an architectural genius or hope to “lick” the building-trades conspiracy. She responded to this by telegram, imploring him to see her. Wright’s secretary again informed her that the architect had gone away. Once The Fountainhead was published, she and Wright would become acquaintances, briefly and tempestuously.

Meanwhile, she scoured the works of architectural and social historians and compared their attitudes to those of Wright. She found most of them to be conventional thinkers, unwitting collectivists, or worse. She gave her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, the pretenses and mannerisms of those she especially disliked: the elegant theoretician Lewis Mumford, who cast a cold eye on technology and praised the architecture of communal life; Heywood Broun, a popular syndicated columnist, champion of the underdog, and founder of the pro-Communist Newspaper Guild; Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker’s book critic and host of the popular radio show Information Please, from whom Toohey received his encyclopedic memory; and British socialist Harold Laski. At the urging of her friend Pincus Berner and his wife, in 1937 she attended one of Laski’s guest lectures at the New School for Social Research and hated him; the following year, she went back to look him over in greater detail. She committed his elegant slouch and air of snide superiority to memory. She said, “You could sense the bared teeth behind [his] smile.” He was Toohey in the flesh.

In early notes for The Fountainhead in 1935, she had briefly sketched the novel’s fifth main character, the New York Banner’s owner and publisher, Gail Wynand. Now she elaborated Wynand’s role in her intricate drama of good and evil. Wynand is a self-made millionaire who owns a vast empire of real estate holdings and newspapers and employs Dominique and Toohey to add a touch of culture to his flagship