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his workmen have spent building the resort—which has been financed by swindlers hoping to lose money—Rand wrote a description that must also have characterized her own experience in 1942. “The year at Monadnock Valley remained in [Roark’s and the workers’] minds as the strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months of spring. … They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring—one’s answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first blue of the sky—the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop.” In the resort’s first season, it becomes a phenomenal success, to the shock and ruination of its crooked backers.

Her work with Channing Pollock placed indefinitely on hold, her admirer Albert Mannheimer having left New York to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood, she saw almost no one that year, apart from the O’Connor brothers and Isabel Paterson. Paterson, too, was finishing a book, her first and only work of nonfiction, an eccentric individualist history of America called The God of the Machine; now largely forgotten, it was influential in its time. Like The Fountainhead, The God of the Machine was scheduled for publication in the spring of 1943. The two friends, who talked by phone most nights, entered into a good-natured competition to see who could finish first. Paterson appears to have won by a week or two. Her prose recalls the somberness of a moment when America was not yet assured of winning World War II. “Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen,” she wrote in her final paragraph, “came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. … If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.”

The human race had no need to perish yet, for Rand had also finished The Fountainhead on time. The principle of individual freedom was alive and well, with a new hero for freedom-loving people to emulate. On the novel’s closing page, Roark’s almost-completed skyscraper rises as an emblem of the independent mind in action. To both Rand and her heroine, Dominique, who stands at the building’s base, the sight is as thrilling as the male principle itself. The tower springs and thrusts. It “breaks through the clay, the iron, the granite” of the earth and, carrying the earth’s fire to the surface, “shoots out to freedom.” As Dominique boards a construction elevator and rides skyward to join her new husband at the pinnacle, she floats above the world’s greatest city’s busy merchant banks, gaudily decorated movie theaters, and solemn church spires until “there was only the ocean, the sky, and the figure of Howard Roark.” So ends The Fountainhead. So began Rand’s life of fame.

SEVEN

MONEY

1943

Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: “I will it!”

—Anthem, 1938

Sales of The Fountainhead got off to a slow start. The 754-page novel was delivered to bookstores on May 7, 1943. Much of the first printing of 7,500 copies remained unsold on bookstore shelves throughout the summer.

Reviewers were hostile or, at best, bewildered. The first important review of the novel appeared in The New York Times on May 12, five days after publication, and was written by the Times’s acid-tongued daily book critic, Orville Prescott. Prescott appeared to be battling his own fascination with the author’s “concentrated intellectual passion” (for the profession of architecture, he thought), flair for melodrama, and “grotesquely peculiar characters” in what amounted to a giddy denunciation of the book. “Miss Rand must have a hidden dynamo of superhuman energy purring inside her head,” he offered. “Her book is so highly charged it seems to vibrate and emit a shower of sparks.” Unfortunately, he continued, the sparks lighted up a fictional world of such “dirty, crawling” malice, animal lust, lechery, and twisted