The Fountainhead (1943). Content and Description

Rand began work on The Fountainhead in 1935. Interestingly enough, she researched her topic by working, without pay, as an architect’s secretary for a year. Rand found an American publisher (Bobs- Merrill) in 1943 and an English publisher (Cassell) in 1947. By August 1945, The Fountainhead had reached number 6 on the New York Times best-seller list. This novel, centered on the creative-genius- architect Howard Roark, is Rand’s true claim to fame; within four decades of its first publication date, The Fountainhead had sold 4 million copies. By the end of its first year in print, Rand had already sold the rights to Hollywood for $50,000, which was a substantial sum of money at the time. She returned to Hollywood with her husband, Frank O’Connor, to write the screenplay that would become a movie starring the box-office stars Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in 1949.

The Fountainhead focuses on characterization. As such, the novel makes extensive use of foils, or characters whose attributes or circumstances can be fruitfully compared and contrasted to clarify both characters and themes. Several such pairs of foils spring to mind. Howard Roark, for instance, the self-determined genius of modernist architecture, is strongly contrasted with another architect, Peter Keating, whose craven need for approval makes him pander to the mob and the beaux-arts architectural cliches of their time. While Peter Keating’s conformity wins him acclaim as a student and a cushy job upon graduation, Roark’s rebellion against the cant of his time and trade causes him to be expelled from school and prevents him from finding work as an architect.

“Howard Roark laughed” is our introduction to Rand’s protagonist; then, “He stood naked at the edge of a cliff.” In contrast, here is our true introduction to Keating: “Peter Keating looked at the streets of New York. The people, he observed, were extremely well dressed.” Typically, Roark is alone, happy in his own skin and content with his own thoughts despite having just been expelled from school. Also typically, Keating is outer-directed, overly concerned with appearance, and looking for clues from those around him, for this is where he must acquire his sense of self.

As did Victor Dunaev in Rand’s We the Living, Peter Keating of The Fountainhead abandons the woman he truly loves, the quiet, unassuming, and unremarkable Catherine Halsey, to make a more advantageous marriage, in this case, to the assertive and beautiful Dominique Francon, the boss’s neurotically self-destructive daughter. Obviously, Dominique and Katie, as Peter calls her, can be seen as another pair of foils. Simple and sweet, Catherine trusts Peter and is crushed into cynical career obsession by his betrayal. Tracing an opposing trajectory in character development, Dominique begins in cynical defeat, believing that evil and mediocrity will destroy all that is singular and excellent, to have her faith in the human power of creative individualism restored through Howard Roark’s victories.

Gail Wynand, another foil for Howard Roark, shares Roark’s excellent mind and creative potential. However, Wynand has engineered his own corrupt defeat by using all his talent to pander to the masses through his newspaper the New York Banner, famous as “the most vulgar newspaper in the country.” Unlike Roark, Wynand is scarred by the poverty of his youth and willing to do whatever it takes to create his own empire and get rich. While Roark is selfish in the sense of caring passionately about his own creative individualism and the products of that talent, he cares little for money.

Ellsworth Toohey, the novel’s villain, writes for Wynand’s newspaper as its architectural critic; not surprisingly, he champions Keating and vows to destroy Howard Roark. Toohey’s brand of elitism, which has been explained as unhealthy, versus Roark’s (and Rand’s) healthy elitism, makes him, in some critic’s eyes, an “apostle of collectivism.” While Toohey and Wynand share both the ego and the will to win, when they come into conflict over Roark’s work, Toohey speaks for the people in demonizing Roark’s designs. Too late, Wynand recognizes a cause worth fighting for but finds that the public, whose tastes he had once believed he could control, abandons him the first time he tries to use his own newspaper for a cause in which he actually believes. Too late, he recognizes that he has betrayed himself; closes down the newspaper; gives Roark his biggest commission yet, vowing never to see him again; and then disappears from the novel.

Dominique Francon can also be seen as one of Roark’s foils. While she has the intellectual power to appreciate Roark and his work, she tries, at first, to destroy him before the mob does. Interestingly enough, she “marries her way up” to the romantic ideal of Howard Roark by starting cynically with Peter Keating, labeled a “second-rater,” then moving on to Gail Wynand, who betrayed all that he knew was right, and finally, after his great victory, becomes Mrs. Howard Roark. We last see her ascending a construction elevator to join him at the top of the skyscraper commissioned by Wynand.

The aforementioned victory serves as the courtroom-drama climax of the novel. With no work coming his way, Roark is hungry, not for money, but for the sight of his work made manifest. At the same time, his foil Peter Keating, fearful always that his work, while neatly mimicking the fashionable taste of the time, will never be quite good enough, asks Roark for help. Keating has been assigned Cortlandt Homes, a public housing project at Francon’s firm where he works (and meets Dominique).

Roark had already been working on the challenging task of designing an aesthetically appealing, but inexpensive public housing project. When Keating begs him for help, Roark agrees to let him use his plan on one proviso—that the project be built exactly as designed. While Keating agrees to this, he has neither the strength nor the will to prevent the board, another collective, from making many ludicrous and expensive changes to Roark’s elegant design. When Roark sees the half-finished product, the betrayal is patent and he vows to take matters into his own hands. Ensuring that no one is hurt, Roark, with Dominique’s help, dynamites the project and is naturally brought up on charges.

Roark acts as his own attorney at his trial. During his speech he argues that the rights of the individual to the fruits of his own mind are essential to American democracy and capitalism. A precursor to the later and more extended rhetorical appeal of John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, Roark’s defense, surprisingly, works. When he is acquitted, Dominique Francon’s faith in the individual is restored, while Gail Wynand’s faith in himself, based on cynical assumptions about the inevitable destruction of greatness, is destroyed. While both Dominique and Gail are proven wrong, Dominique is able to recover from that discovery while Wynand is not; thus they are foils.

Roark’s appeal to the jury has been described as an argument for the “liberal ethic based on the principle, handed down from the Enlightenment, for the equal rights of all individuals to be left alone [with its] economic expression [as] laissez-faire capitalism.” Here Roark’s (and Rand’s) advocacy of minimal government and free enterprise can be seen as an expression of the “classical Americanism” of other writers, such as the novelist and critic Isabel Paterson of The God of the Machine, published in 1943.

Critical response to The Fountainhead was even more polarized than response to Rand’s previous novels We the Living and Anthem. While We the Living, for instance, was occasionally dismissed as “good reading; bad pleading,” Anthem was far less argumentative in its approach and, as more of a parable, less subject to rhetorical or philosophical critique. The Fountainhead, on the other hand, struck a nerve with many who viewed collectivism, as practiced by the Soviets, for instance, as a noble cause, albeit one that had been betrayed. Capitalism, on the other hand, was often viewed as a more or less workable system that somehow transformed the private vice of selfishness into something that benefited society at large.

Rand, as The Fountainhead made clear, condemned the group-think that touted the public good over all else as intrinsically evil, while she lauded selfishness, as expressed in private enterprise, as intrinsically virtuous. In addition to the unorthodox stance, Rand’s stated position on other issues alienated her from both ends of the political spectrum: Her dismissal of religion as mysticism angered social political conservatives; her insistence that individuals must decide between right and wrong on the basis of objective standards alienated liberals who subscribed to relativism. This polarization would only increase as Rand carefully worked out a fully systematic epistemology through her next, and last, novel, Atlas Shrugged.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. We first meet Howard Roark, as stated previously, alone at the edge of a cliff. Consider the description that follows: “The lake lay below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of a brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone flowed, wet with sunrays.” Why is this an appropriate introduction to Roark as the self-determined architect of the modernist (versus traditional) style?

2. Find a literary definition of the world lyricism and consider the previous quote as an example of lyrical writing, as well as Rand’s intriguing use of paradox in this description.

3. Many critics read the first sexual encounter between Dominique and Roark as a rape scene. Do you agree? How would you defend Rand’s choice on artistic and/or psychological grounds?

4. Find reviews of Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, published in 1943, and compare its political philosophy to that expressed in Rand’s The Fountainhead.

5. Tragic heroes are those with noble qualities who suffer and fall, at least in part, through their own hamartia (from Greek, meaning “error” and in the theological tradition “sin” and often discussed as a “tragic flaw”), combined with circumstances over which they have no control. Compare Gail Wynand of The Fountainhead to Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in terms of their respective hamartia as it affects their failed attempt to achieve the American dream and keep the women they love.