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THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand

To Frank O’Connor

Copyright (c) 1943 The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Copyright (c) renewed 1971 by Ayn Rand.

All rights reserved. For information address The Bobbs-Merrill Company, a

division of Macmillan, Inc., 866 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

Many people have asked me how I feel about the fact that The Fountainhead has

been in print for twenty-five years. I cannot say that I feel anything in

particular, except a kind of quiet satisfaction. In this respect, my attitude

toward my writing is best expressed by a statement of Victor Hugo: "If a writer

wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away."

Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of

the moment. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish

in a month or a year. That most of them do, today, that they are written and

published as if they were magazines, to fade as rapidly, is one of the sorriest

aspects of today’s literature, and one of the clearest indictments of its

dominant esthetic philosophy: concrete-bound, journalistic Naturalism which has

now reached its dead end in the inarticulate sounds of panic.

Longevity-predominantly, though not exclusively-is the prerogative of a literary

school which is virtually non-existent today: Romanticism. This is not the place

for a dissertation on the nature of Romantic fiction, so let me state--for the

record and for the benefit of those college students who have never been allowed

to discover it--only that Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals,

not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental,

universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or

photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned--in the words of

Aristotle--not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and

ought to be.

And for the benefit of those who consider relevance to one’s own time as of

crucial importance, I will add, in regard to our age, that never has there been

a time when men have so desperately needed a projection of things as they ought

to be.

I do not mean to imply that I knew, when I wrote it, that The Fountainhead would

remain in print for twenty-five years. I did not think of any specific time

period. I knew only that it was a book that ought to live. It did.

But that I knew it over twenty-five years ago--that I knew it while The

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Fountainhead was being rejected by twelve publishers, some of whom declared that

it was "too intellectual,"

"too controversial" and would not sell because no audience existed for it--that

was the difficult part of its history; difficult for me to bear. I mention it

here for the sake of any other writer of my kind who might have to face the same

battle--as a reminder of the fact that it can be done.

It would be impossible for me to discuss The Fountainhead or any part of its

history without mentioning the man who made it possible for me to write it: my

husband, Frank O’Connor.

In a play I wrote in my early thirties, Ideal, the heroine, a screen star,

speaks for me when she says: "I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of

my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know

that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of

seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit,

too, needs fuel. It can run dry."

Frank was the fuel. He gave me, in the hours of my own days, the reality of that

sense of life, which created The Fountainhead--and he helped me to maintain it

over a long span of years when there was nothing around us but a gray desert of

people and events that evoked nothing but contempt and revulsion. The essence of

the bond between us is the fact that neither of us has ever wanted or been

tempted to settle for anything less than the world presented in The

Fountainhead. We never will.

If there is in me any touch of the Naturalistic writer who records "real-life"

dialogue for use in a novel, it has been exercised only in regard to Frank. For

instance, one of the most effective lines in The Fountainhead comes at the end

of Part II, when, in reply to Toohey’s question: "Why don’t you tell me what you

think of me?" Roark answers: "But I don’t think of you." That line was Frank’s

answer to a different type of person, in a somewhat similar context. "You’re

casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return," was said by Frank to

me, in regard to my professional position. I gave that line to Dominique at

Roark’s trial.

I did not feel discouragement very often, and when I did, it did not last longer

than overnight. But there was one evening, during the writing of The

Fountainhead, when I 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." Frank talked to me for hours, that

night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one

despises. By the time he finished, my discouragement was gone; it never came

back in so intense a form.

I had been opposed to the practice of dedicating books; I had held that a book

is addressed to any reader who proves worthy of it. But, that night, I told

Frank that I would dedicate The Fountainhead to him because he had saved it. And

one of my happiest moments, about two years later, was given to me by the look

on his face when he came home, one day, and saw the page-proofs of the book,

headed by the page that stated in cold, clear, objective print: To Frank

O’Connor.

I have been asked whether I have changed in these past twenty-five years. No, I

am the same--only more so. Have my ideas changed? No, my fundamental

convictions, my view of life and of man, have never changed, from as far back as

I can remember, but my knowledge of their applications has grown, in scope and

in precision. What is my present evaluation of The Fountainhead? I am as proud

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of it as I was on the day when I finished writing it.

Was The Fountainhead written for the purpose of presenting my philosophy? Here,

I shall quote from The Goal of My Writing, an address I gave at Lewis and Clark

College, on October 1, 1963: "This is the motive and purpose of my writing; the

projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate

literary goal, as an end in itself--to which any didactic, intellectual or

philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.

"Let me stress this: my purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my

readers...My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard

Roark [or the heroes of Atlas Shrugged} as an end in himself...

"I write--and read--for the sake of the story...My basic test for any story is:

’Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is

this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure

of contemplating these characters an end in itself?’...

"Since my purpose is the presentation of an ideal man, I had to define and

present the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires.

Since man’s character is the product of his premises, I had to define and

present the kinds of premises and values that create the character of an ideal

man and motivate his actions; which means that I had to define and present a

rational code of ethics. Since man acts among and deals with other men, I had to

present the kind of social system that makes it possible for ideal men to exist

and to function--a free, productive, rational system which demands and rewards

the best in every man, and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism.

"But neither politics nor ethics nor philosophy is an end in itself, neither in

life nor in literature. Only Man is an end in himself."

Are there any substantial changes I would want to make in The Fountainhead?

No--and, therefore, I have left its text untouched. I want it to stand as it was

written. But there is one minor error and one possibly misleading sentence which

I should like to clarify, so I shall mention them here.

The error is semantic: the use of the word "egotist" in Roark’s courtroom

speech, while actually the word should have been "egoist." The error was caused

by my reliance on a dictionary which gave such misleading definitions of these

two words that "egotist" seemed closer to the meaning I intended (Webster’s

Daily Use Dictionary, 1933). (Modern philosophers, however, are guiltier than

lexicographers in regard to these two terms.)

The possibly misleading sentence is in Roark’s speech: "From this simplest

necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the

skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single

attribute of man--the function of his reasoning mind."

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious

ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding

that Roark’s and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so

clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I

said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of

supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was

referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions,

the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of

religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the

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abstraction "ethics," the realm of values, man’s code of good and evil, with the

emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which

pertain to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to

itself.

The same meaning and considerations were intended and are applicable to another

passage of the book, a brief dialogue between Roark and Hopton Stoddard, which

may be misunderstood if taken out of context:

"’You’re a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark--in your own way. I can see that

in your buildings.’

"’That’s true,’ said Roark."

In the context of that scene, however, the meaning is clear: it is Roark’s

profound dedication to values, to the highest and best, to the ideal, that

Stoddard is referring to (see his explanation of the nature of the proposed

temple). The erection of the Stoddard Temple and the subsequent trial state the

issue explicitly.

This leads me to a wider issue which is involved in every line of The

Fountainhead and which has to be understood if one wants to understand the

causes of its lasting appeal.

Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to

communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life.

Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against

man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them

outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. "Exaltation" is usually taken to mean

an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. "Worship" means the

emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man.

"Reverence" means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s

knees. "Sacred" means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man

or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension

exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without

the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their

source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s

dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced

by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words

or recognition.

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk

of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the

sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.

It is an emotion that a few--a very few--men experience consistently; some men

experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences;

some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as

frantically virulent spark-extinguishers.

Do not confuse "man-worship" with the many attempts, not to emancipate morality

from religion and bring it into the realm of reason, but to substitute a secular

meaning for the worst, the most profoundly irrational elements of religion. For

instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist,

Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely

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substitute "society" for God as the beneficiary of man’s self-immolation. There

are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of

identity, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux ruled by miracles and

shaped by whims--not God’s whims, but man’s or "society’s." These neo-mystics

are not man-worshipers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred

for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.

A cruder variant of the same hatred is represented by those concrete-bound,

"statistical" mentalities who--unable to grasp the meaning of man’s

volition--declare that man cannot be an object of worship, since they have never

encountered any specimens of humanity who deserved it.