The Fountainhead

Summary

The Fountainhead follows the career of Howard Roark, a young architect who designs buildings according to his own principles and refuses to imitate historical styles or to compromise with clients, committees and critics. Ayn Rand presents him as her ideal of the independent creator, and she sets him against a cast of characters who, in her terms, live through and for others. The novel opens with Roark's expulsion from the Stanton Institute of Technology for his unconventional designs. He apprentices himself to Henry Cameron, an embittered pioneer of modern architecture, while his classmate Peter Keating joins the prestigious firm of Guy Francon and rises quickly by flattery, borrowed ideas and social maneuvering. Roark's commissions are few; when work dries up he takes a job in a granite quarry. There he meets Dominique Francon, Guy Francon's daughter, a newspaper columnist who admires Roark's work but believes the world will destroy it. Their first sexual encounter, which many readers describe as a rape, begins a relationship of attraction and resistance that lasts the length of the book. The antagonist is Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture critic and social theorist who seeks power by promoting mediocrity and collectivism. Toohey engineers a lawsuit over Roark's Stoddard Temple that ruins his reputation. Dominique marries Keating, then the newspaper publisher Gail Wynand, a self-made man who has gained power by giving the public what it wants. Wynand and Roark become close friends. Keating, failing, asks Roark to design the Cortlandt Homes housing project secretly, under Keating's name, on condition that it be built exactly as designed. When the design is altered, Roark dynamites the unfinished buildings. At his trial he speaks in his own defense, arguing that the creator's work belongs to the creator and that civilization depends on independent minds; the jury acquits him. Wynand, who had defended Roark in his paper and then surrendered under pressure, closes the paper and commissions Roark to design the Wynand Building. Dominique marries Roark, and the novel ends with her rising to meet him at the top of the building. The book was rejected by a dozen publishers before Bobbs-Merrill issued it in 1943. Word of mouth made it a best seller, and it remains Rand's most widely taught novel and a common entry point to her ideas.

Top Lessons

• Independence and the creator

  Rand presents Roark as a man who judges by his own standards and treats creative work as the creator's property. Students can examine whether her ideal of independence leaves room for collaboration and influence.

• First-hand and second-hand lives

  Rand calls people like Keating 'second-handers', who live through others' opinions. The contrast offers a vocabulary for discussing integrity, conformity and approval.

• Ideals in public life

  Wynand's paper and Toohey's columns show how ideas spread and how public opinion is managed. The novel raises questions about the press and about power exercised through persuasion.

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