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without protest. He was proud of his brilliant and courageous wife, he confided to his niece. But Mimi thought he appeared less guarded and more at ease when Rand wasn’t present. At one point he told her that he would have liked to have children but that “it wouldn’t fit with Ayn.” Mimi may already have known of her aunt’s decision to have an abortion earlier in the 1930s, since Mimi’s father, A. M. Papurt, had loaned O’Connor the money to pay for it. It is interesting to note that children do not figure much in Rand’s fictional universe, with the exception of a few flashbacks and the character of eight-year-old Acia Dunaeva in We the Living, who behaves like a spoiled five-year-old. In homage to their philosopher-queen and her characters, some of her followers would also forgo having children.

Beginning with We the Living, Rand wrote the first drafts of her novels in longhand, and after completing a scene or a section read it aloud to Frank and Nick. So it is also likely that she and her husband discussed her fictional sexual triangles in both We the Living and The Fountainhead. Based on material in her journals, at least one commentator has argued that her basic model for male sexual psychology in her novels was Frank O’Connor and that he enjoyed her three-sided sexual fantasies and, perhaps, her first and subsequent flirtations.

At that time, O’Connor had a mischievous sense of adventure. One afternoon, he took Mimi around to modeling agencies for tryouts, as a lark. Another day, he brought her to the Town Hall Club, on West Forty-third Street, where he drank Scotch at the bar. They were away from home for five hours, and Rand was frantic when they returned. Frank remained calm when she cried, “Where have you been? I thought you were dead!”

The curtain of Broadway’s Biltmore Theater finally rose on The Unconquered on February 13, 1940, six weeks later than announced. The first-night audience was packed with theatrical and film-world celebrities in tuxedos, evening gowns, and furs. Jagger gave an elegant opening-night party while the cast and crew awaited the reviews. But the reaction of critics was anything but festive, withholding from the play even the faint praise that, at a minimum, they had bestowed on The Night of January 16th. The conservative Herald Tribune, which had applauded the novel, called the play “one of the season’s mishaps” and observed that it was so clumsy as to confuse the audience about whether it might be advocating Bolshevik propaganda. The New York Times complained that it did not delve deeply enough into the individual rights of man, where, the reviewer wrote, “there would be a play.” It’s easy to imagine Rand’s anger and humiliation. She came home that night in tears and spent the next two days in bed, despondent.

The Unconquered closed abruptly after a five-day run. It had not produced new royalties for her to live on and had in fact cost her money in car fare, restaurant meals, and other out-of-pocket expenses. It had further damaged her literary reputation. And it had led the nation’s premier newspaper to blame her for neglecting the very message she had been trying to deliver, one that she believed grew more urgent every day: safeguarding the individual against the majority, the mob, the collective, the church, the state, the Soviet.

On February 18, the day after the final curtain fell and the cast disbanded, she resumed her work on The Fountainhead. For unknown reasons, she left off again in May, a month before her second and final Knopf due date. She may have been discouraged or depressed. One night in early June, she recalled, she “felt so profound an indignation at the state of things as they are that it seemed as if I would never regain the energy to move one step farther toward things as they ought to be,” in the shape of Howard Roark. “Frank talked to me for hours that night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despises. That night, I told Frank that I would dedicate The Fountainhead to him because he had saved it.”

At some point in 1938, Rand had