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Blueprints for The Fountainhead

How Ayn Rand Planned Her Classic Novel

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Gallery IntroductionEarly PlanningOutlinesStory BuildingScene Planning Perfecting a Masterpiece Ideas Matter ConclusionBibliography and Additional ResourcesExhibit Credits

Gallery Introduction

Welcome to the gallery of our online exhibit, which illustrates how Ayn Rand planned The Fountainhead.

We invite you to dive deeper into the notes and research that Rand undertook before she began writing. Presented here are 204 manuscript pages with accompanying transcripts that form the bulk of Rand’s planning material for the novel. These documents focus on the novel’s plot, including her early thoughts, outlines, and notes on particular scenes or parts of the story.

Please remember, as with the items in the introduction to this exhibit, Rand did not intend any of this material for publication; she was thinking on paper. The ideas found here often do not represent her final philosophical views, but they do illustrate how her thinking developed over time. And of course, if you’ve yet to read the novel, there are plot spoilers throughout the exhibit. 

Taken together, the manuscript pages exhibited here provide a wealth of information about how Rand wrote The Fountainhead, which, for the first time in her fiction-writing career, brought to life her ideal man.

Transcript note:

The transcripts in this exhibit are formatted to facilitate ease of reading. As such, they do not attempt to capture the full detail of possible markings on the original manuscript pages. They do capture words or phrases that Ayn Rand struck out, words that are [illegible], or words that are [?uncertain]. Any other transcriber notes are included as [italics within brackets]. Any grammatical or spelling errors original to the documents are not corrected in these transcripts.

Elements of the originals that are not captured in these transcripts include:

  • Rand’s early use of a European style of a lower opening quotation mark

  • insertion marks for words or phrases that were inserted later

  • markings used by Rand to move phrases from one part of the page to another

  • check marks used by Rand to indicate completion

  • re-writes or replacements of individual numbers or letters (especially for dates and chapter headings in outlines), which have been simplified to Rand’s final choice of number/letter

We encourage readers to examine the original pages as well as the transcripts for a full understanding of Rand’s work in these notes.

Early Planning

Before Ayn Rand could begin writing The Fountainhead, she first had to outline and plan it, a task that she began in 1935. Later in her life, Rand wrote more explicitly about the important elements that a good novel has to have: a theme, a plot-theme (a concept original to Rand), a plot, and a climax. For The Fountainhead, her earliest notes identify the novel’s theme and the plot-theme. The full plot and the vital element of the climax took longer to develop.

Of special interest in this section are the first items, her earliest written notes (identified by her working title, “Second-Hand Lives”) and the binder that held them. These pages contain her initial thoughts about the story and its purpose, followed by early character notes for several of the book’s important characters. Readers will see that she quotes and makes other references to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche here, and although Rand already rejected much of his philosophy, his language celebrating great individuals still held some appeal to her. Shoshana Milgram’s essay “The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel” covers Rand’s shift away from any remnants of Nietzsche’s thought as she progressed through her writing.

In the remaining items in this section, we see Rand further refining the story’s ideas, characters, and progression of events. For several of the main characters, it took time for her to decide on the names she wanted to use, so earlier choices (some replaced and some not) are in evidence here. She identified the climax of the story (the destruction of a housing project) around April 1938, which is when it first appeared in her notes. With that crucial element identified, she could then move on to the next stages of work.

Early Planning

Before Ayn Rand could begin writing The Fountainhead, she first had to outline and plan it, a task that she began in 1935. Later in her life, Rand wrote more explicitly about the important elements that a good novel has to have: a theme, a plot-theme (a concept original to Rand), a plot, and a climax. For The Fountainhead, her earliest notes identify the novel’s theme and the plot-theme. The full plot and the vital element of the climax took longer to develop.

Of special interest in this section are the first items, her earliest written notes (identified by her working title, “Second-Hand Lives”) and the binder that held them. These pages contain her initial thoughts about the story and its purpose, followed by early character notes for several of the book’s important characters. Readers will see that she quotes and makes other references to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche here, and although Rand already rejected much of his philosophy, his language celebrating great individuals still held some appeal to her. Shoshana Milgram’s essayThe Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel” covers Rand’s shift away from any remnants of Nietzsche’s thought as she progressed through her writing.

In the remaining items in this section, we see Rand further refining the story’s ideas, characters, and progression of events. For several of the main characters, it took time for her to decide on the names she wanted to use, so earlier choices (some replaced and some not) are in evidence here. She identified the climax of the story (the destruction of a housing project) around April 1938, which is when it first appeared in her notes. With that crucial element identified, she could then move on to the next stages of work.

Outlines

With the climax of The Fountainhead identified by April 1938, Rand began working on more detailed outlines of the full novel, laying out the whole plot.

Only with that pivotal event identified could she build the rest of the story to logically lead to it. As Rand stated many years later, a plot is “a purposeful progression of events,” which must logically lead to something—the climax. Roark dynamiting a housing project was sufficiently dramatic to serve as a climax, and (as she noted in her later biographical interviews) it combined “a political issue and an architectural issue” (that of housing) and all the main characters and “their chief conflicts or issues.” It was thanks to her work in architect Ely Jacques Kahn’s office and conversations with him that she gathered the knowledge she needed to identify this climax.

These outlines, which cover the novel’s four parts in detail, span early 1938 to 1942. Those from 1938 were completed before she began writing the first draft (the first page of which is dated June 26, 1938). The later outlines from the 1940s represent revisions done after she began writing.

Rand’s efforts to make sure the story progressed logically and dramatized the ideas she wanted to convey involved much editing of these outlines, especially the earliest ones. Because of this extensive editing, the outlines are complex to read. They are organized here by parts of the novel (I–IV) and then chronologically within each part.

Story Building

Even after Rand began writing The Fountainhead, she still had to do additional thinking and planning to work out aspects of the story in greater detail than in her earlier notes or outlines. In this section, we see examples of her working out sequences of events or asking about the logic behind a part of the story.

This mattered because Rand believed that “the most important element of a novel is plot,” which “is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.” Rand was very plot-focused as she worked on The Fountainhead, and changed or removed anything that did not serve the story’s plot. An interesting example is found in the fourth item in this section, where originally Rand tried to work out a reason why Roark would need to sue Dominique while their love affair was going on in private. Unable to fit this event logically into the story, Rand abandoned it.

Characters had to fit the story as well. Early outlines (and drafts) include a character called Vesta Dunning, whom Rand later removed from the story. As noted in The Early Ayn Rand, she “cut Vesta from the novel…when she realized that there was too great a similarity between Vesta and Gail Wynand.” Although Rand considered the material about Vesta “some of my best writing,” her objective assessment that it did not serve the plot led her to cut it without hesitation.

Scene Planning

Some scenes in the novel required extra attention, and in those cases, Rand planned them out individually. The items in this section represent notes of this type, from the opening of the story to Roark’s final speech. Although they are presented here in the order that the relevant scenes appear in the novel, the dates show that this was not fully the order in which Rand worked on them.

These notes had differing lengths and structures, depending on what Rand was trying to work out: some were outlines, others summaries or narratives. The second item here shows Rand’s development of Roark and Dominique’s earliest interactions, providing evidence of their mutual attraction. Also of note is the fourth item, which is an extended summary of an alternate ending, dated shortly after she decided the story’s climax. Although that event (Roark dynamiting a housing project) remains in the final novel, this early summary indicates that Rand originally conceived the events following that one quite differently.

Perfecting a Masterpiece

Rand was determined to get everything about The Fountainhead right, from its broadest abstract ideas down to the architectural details, in order to make sure that she conveyed her theme accurately, compellingly and dramatically.

The evidence presented in Rand’s notes, from this section and throughout the exhibit, shows that she was exacting in editing her own work. Regularly, she questioned the “necessity” of elements in the story, from adjectives all the way up to entire scenes and characters. If they did not convey her theme and fit the plot, she removed them.

For everything that did belong in the story, Rand worked hard to convey it in a focused, accurate way. The first item here contains several examples of this where she identified events for both Keating and Roark that were important, but needed to be focused and shortened. Subsequent items show her correcting smaller inaccuracies or writing down architectural questions to answer later. Although architecture was the background, rather than the theme, of the novel, accuracy of that background made the story more compelling. Rand researched architecture extensively during her early planning of the novel and volunteered in the office of architect Ely Jacques Kahn for several months to gain further understanding of the profession.

Ideas Matter

Although Rand worked out the major philosophical ideas that were important to the story in her earliest notes (see the first section), she continued to think and write about these ideas as she worked on the novel.

Rand wrote later that she felt “part patience, part amusement and, at times, an empty kind of weariness—when I am asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher (as if these two were antonyms)….” It is clear that philosophy—particularly ethics—is a vital part of The Fountainhead. But this was because Rand’s goal was projecting a moral ideal as her “ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.” Rand’s “basic test” for any story (her own or otherwise) was “Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life?” She went on to say that “it’s as simple as that. But that simplicity involves the total of man’s existence.”

There aren’t a large number of later philosophical notes, but these few show her continuing to “chew” on various aspects of independence vs. second-handedness, even up to a couple of years after she started writing the novel. Onkar Ghate’s essay “The Basic Motivation of the Creators and the Masses in The Fountainhead” provides additional insight into her philosophical work in the novel.

Conclusion

Telling a good story was foremost for Rand in all of her fiction writing: “I write—and read—for the sake of the story.” But The Fountainhead also represents Rand’s first success at another important goal: “The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man.” As the material throughout this exhibit makes clear, she dedicated time and thought in order to achieve her literary vision.

“It has been a day and night job, literally,” she noted in an early 1942 letter to her editor, Archibald Ogden. “The record, so far, was one day when I started writing at 4 p.m. and stopped at 1 p.m. the next day.… I have gone for two or three days at a time without undressing—I’d just fall asleep on the couch for a few hours, then get up and go on.”

Her efforts were successful. In Howard Roark, Rand achieved her first projection of an ideal man. In The Fountainhead, she told a compelling story about “individualism and collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul,” that has timeless, universal relevance, and which therefore has appealed to millions of readers over decades and around the world.

We hope you have enjoyed exploring Ayn Rand’s work on The Fountainhead in more depth. If you’d like to learn more, please see the Additional Resources below.

This exhibit was made possible by donors to the Ayn Rand Institute; we appreciate their support.

Bibliography and Additional Resources

Bibliography

(All sources directly quoted.)

Berliner, Mike, ed. Letters of Ayn Rand. 2nd, online ed. Ayn Rand Institute, 2022. https://mmichulka.aynrand.org/archives/

Mayhew, Robert, ed. Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 
[To read many of these essays online, click here.]

Rand, Ayn. The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers. Edited by Tore Boeckmann. Plume, 2000.

Rand, Ayn. Biographical interviews by Barbara Branden, 1960-1961.

Rand, Ayn. The Early Ayn Rand. Revised ed. Edited by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Signet, 2005.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Scribner, 1986.

Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto. 2nd revised ed. New York: Signet, 1975.

Additional Resources

(Sources suggested for further exploration and not previously cited.)

Bayer, Ben and Keith Lockitch. “Discussing The Fountainhead, Part II, Chapters 1-8.” Recorded in 2020 by the Ayn Rand Institute. https://www.youtube.com/live/bWqGWCRvB6M?feature=share
[For the full discussion series, click here.]

Bowden, Tom. “Nietzsche’s Influence on The Fountainhead.” New Ideal (July 9, 2018). https://newideal.aynrand.org/nietzsches-influence-on-the-fountainhead/

Ghate, Onkar. “Is Ayn Rand a Writer of Didactic Fiction?” New Ideal (April 4, 2018). https://newideal.aynrand.org/is-ayn-rand-a-writer-of-didactic-fiction-2/

Journo, Elan and Shoshana Milgram. “The Dramatic Story Behind the Making of The Fountainhead Movie.” Recorded in 2019 by the Ayn Rand Institute. https://youtu.be/ITXsl4r_Dg0

Mayhew, Robert. “‘Kill by Laughter’: Humor in The Fountainhead.” Recorded in 2018 by the Ayn Rand Institute in Newport Beach, CA. https://youtu.be/lAdMUuNyn2s

Milgram, Shoshana. “Frank Lloyd Wright and The Fountainhead.” Recorded in 2018 by the Ayn Rand Institute in Newport Beach, CA. https://youtu.be/_92ExHpA1vc

Exhibit Credits

Curator: Audra Hilse
Editorial Assistance: Elan Journo, Brandon Lisi, Tom Bowden, Jeff Britting, Onkar Ghate
Transcription: Audra Hilse, David Hayes, Ginger Clark, Brandon Lisi, Daniel Schwartz, and other ARI Junior Fellows.
Web Production: Jesse Hashagen, Vinicius Freire
Audiovisual Production: Lucy Rose
Proofreading: Donna Montrezza



SPECIAL THANKS
Leonard Peikoff

Ayn Rand Institute Donors