I was kind of obsessed with Ayn Rand as a literary figure. I mean, that cigarette. Those staring eyes. Plus she was totally committed to her point of view/philosophy and got a lot of people to follow along. Just a fascinating person. I enjoyed reading both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (I'm okay with philosophy couched in narrative), though there were some things in AS that I questioned (and still do, even more, now that I'm decades older than when I read it.) The thing is, we need all kinds of people in the world. If the very few "Prometheus capitalists" succeed in gathering all the capital to themselves, then they've "won." But what is the world they are left with? If nobody else has any gold, who will be able to buy their train tickets and steel and really darn good cigarettes and perfect hamburgers? Supposedly, these Prometheuses pay a decent wage to the really good workers. Okay. But our current "Industrialists" want to make robots to do that work. We might actually need to think about this right now as the great inventors of our day roll out artificial intelligence. Should we reward excellence? Yes! For sure. On the other hand, people enjoy different things, and sometimes (often) the masses enjoy things that "experts" consider less than excellent. Who is to decide? The market, supposedly. So . . . IS the market really the best arbiter of, say, taste? No system is perfect. Ayn Rand certainly wasn't perfect. This story was fun to read and brought me back a few decades.
"If nobody else has any gold, who will be able to buy their train tickets and steel and really darn good cigarettes and perfect hamburgers?"
Stop whining. You'll be able to earn gold overnight by selling your body to some genius who'll knock you down and bonk you senseless. Actually, it's the long lecture that's the most painful part.
For my generation, Ayn Rand had fallen out of favor because of her promotion of a kind of proto-Libertarian selfish individualism. I was reminded of this by architect Stanley Tigerman's account of his brief meeting with Rand:
It was the uncompromising and individualist hero of Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” that inspired Stanley Tigerman to become an architect. “I read the book when I was about 12 or 13 … And I thought, this is what the fuck I’m going to do.” …
"When I saw in the Yale Daily News that Ayn Rand was giving a lecture, I got my buddies in the master’s class and we went to see her. Afterward, stupidly, forgetting her well-known antagonism towards selflessness, I went to introduce myself. I said ‘My name is Stanley Tigerman, I’m at the graduate school in architecture. Reading your book as a child really impacted my life and I just wanted to thank you for getting me here.’ And she looked at me in that New York snotty way, up and down, and said, ‘So what?'“
That's horrible. Not surprising considering who did it, but horrible. There is something to be said for kindness in this world and it doesn't need a dollar sign on it. (Perfect for her branding, though. Look, you are telling this story how many years later? She's beautifully, perfectly, excellently horrible.)
Given how much I loathed The Fountainhead (which I read at 14, I think), it's remarkable how much of it has stuck with me (I could say the same of Gone With the Wind, which, if possible, I hate even more). It's a testament to the writing that I still think about it, even if what I think is largely "how can you be building a temple to the human spirit when you hate other human beings so much?"
Of course, I also believe that living a life dedicated to serving others adds to your life rather than detracting from it, which I suspect explains much about why I became a librarian and not a Famous Writer.
I like the enthusiasm you write about Ayn Rand and understand that a 13-year-old boy could fall in love with this romantic novel. But for the 40-year-old woman to continue to be delighted with this rather primitive novel is not understandable to me. The novel was written by a Russian, a very ambitious emigre, in hard English, without any artistic nuance, with a simplistic sense of the novel. There is a positive hero, there is a negative hero, and there is an extremely beautiful woman between them. The positive hero is victorious with this good deal and a woman. This is a scheme of the novel, it's a scheme of Soviet Socialist Realism. I am surprised that somebody among adults continues to read this kind of literature.
Many critics have pointed out the resemblance between Rand’s work and Soviet social realism. I also have a soft spot for the latter—I enjoyed Gladkov’s Cement.
I have to be short. My second comment disappeared, and I don't know why. Mb, one Gladkov is interesting for a foreigner, but the hundreds of them made you howl. Andrei Platonov and others wrote differently. I won't bother you with the details of their tragic fate. Ayn Rand was young, smart, ambitious, and with good ideas, but without literary talent. She wrote about good, possessing reason, capitalists, and had a great success in this system. But she wasn't a talented writer; that is why she decided to be a philosopher. Here I stop, I am afraid, my text runs away from me. Thank you.
Thank you, Joe David, Ronald Gordon, and two others, for reading my comment and agreeing with me. I was surprised that such an influential figure as Naomi Kanakia propagandized a mediocre writer as Ayn Rand.
Atlas Shrugged was a hugely significant book to me when I was 15, but the left-of-center circles that I travel in tend to treat you like a monstrous leper if you ever admit to appreciating Ayn Rand.
Abandoning the dictatorship of consensus is the best feeling in the world. Maybe not the best - but it feels liberating. Some snarky people decided that the thing you like “sucks, actually” - alright, whatever
I've never read any Ayn Rand. My kid was assigned an SF book (called ANTHEM, maybe?) during middle school and the description of that was bananas.
Her real life as a cult leader was what always interested me.
"The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational."
That's a dystopian novella, not a bad book (from my high school memory) but not great either. Reads more like a cartoonish propaganda piece about why socialism and pronouns will ruin society.
Hilariously, "these scary new pronouns will destroy society" is very explicitly the plot of "Anthem" -- except that society is conformist and oppressive, so this is a good thing.
When I read things like this I of course say "yeah, people with vision who are true to themselves, that's how people should be!"
But then I remember how I feel about architects in the real world. They are notoriously arrogant. And what their assholery means is glass apartment towers that ruin street life and public buildings that make people feel unwelcome and alienated. So I don't know what to think.
I suppose I only feel this way about the built environment. In writing and visual art and fashion etc. the Roarks of the world are inspiring.
Thank you for writing this! I started with Terry Goodkind's fantasy send-ups of Rand when I was in middle school as well, then graduated to The Fountainhead after reading blistering reviews of Faith of the Fallen which (accurately) noted that it was drawn from The Fountainhead in ways that were evident to people more worldly than I was. I found her total commitment to her ideology completely fascinating and delightful in ways that people in college with me in 2019 found moderately alarming, but... every time I read her work felt like a thrilling debate, in a sense, with someone who refuses to yield in sometimes-genuinely-persuasive ways that hone your own case and approach more sharply for it. Reading your thoughts on the subject has me reaching back for my old copy. This is a really lovely piece.
Oh I have read all those Terry Goodkind books too! The most Randian of them, Faith of the Fallen, was a guilty pleasure, though I don’t know if it would hold up, since I have never reread it as an adult.
I reread it about two weeks ago and loved it in a very different way than I did at twelve. Nicci is still my favorite character in any fantasy novel, ever, and I forced my wife to get up and look at the page when I re-encountered the most delightfully earnest line of dialogue ever written:
"As you know," Nicci said, "I am not a very good person."
It gets me every time. I was kicking my feet in the air and giggling the whole time. Felt like a sleepover in my childhood bedroom with old friends who are shockingly easy to talk to but occasionally remind you why they are old friends and not current friends. I loved every minute of it.
While Ayn Rand's concept about 'excellence' is interesting and provided controversary and sales at one time, it did little to enlighten the world about how one's world needs to operate. Her global concepts were misleading if not unrealistic. The Fountainhead might well be worth a read at college level, where debate should be the essence of learning (not at liberal schools, though), but it would hardly do a lot for a younger person who is and should be struggling with the basic skills that lead to 'success' in the most fundamental way. Reading, writing, arithmetic, coping with your immediate environment, adjusting to the prospect of supporting one's self and contributing to the small 'team' of which is your home, school and community. To suggest to a child that there is a level of excellence that he or she might achieve is to set one up for failure. Excellence? In who's eyes? Who is this judge that knows 'excellence' as no one else does? The person who believes ever society should be governed in such a way that every one is equal? Where does 'excellence' fit in there? Only with those who govern perhaps. Excellency. All others are doomed to mediocracy. At any rate, Ayn Rand fan or not, the essay was thought provoking. Confusion Breeds Confusion might have been an appropriate title for most of Rand's work.
I'm rereading and annotating Atlas Shrugged right now! There's something Rand in the air. I wish Atlas Shrugged had a villain as charismatic as Ellsworth Toohey, but there is something genuinely moving about Rand's clarity (and her commitment to clarity as a virtue) even if I don't agree with her economics.
Totally agree. The Fountainhead has one of the best character introductions ever and it's for Toohey. If I remember right, it says something like "When he was in school, he debated that the pen is mightier than the sword, and won. Then he debated for the opposite view and won again." Extreme competence, zero principles. And I also love that scene where he asks Roark, "I wonder what you think of me, Mr. Roark?" and Roark says "I don't think of you at all." Toohey really made me root for Roark.
This review was such a page turner though I've read the book. Loved it. I also related to the Johanna character quite a bit. My dad gave me a copy of The Fountainhead when I was 15 and said it was the best book he'd read in college, and I read it like gospel truth. I read Atlas Shrugged as well. I took away the lesson that if you believe in something and work extremely hard for it, success will come. I think that attitude helped me do very well academically (I thought I was going to be a mathematician and solve the Riemann hypothesis), and got me out of the small town I was born in.
But in college I realized there's a big difference between Roark and me. Roark didn't care whether people liked him. He didn't care what people thought was good. He decided what was good and kept pushing. I cared what people thought of me, but I kept pretending like I didn't. I was annoyed people weren't wowed by my idealism. I was turning into a jerk. At some point I realised that and changed, and I'm happy I did.
There's an argument for the middlebrow. Roark seems to act like beauty and truth is objective, and can never emerge from consensus, but that's not always true. If you're an entrepreneur trying to make people's lives better, you don't invent some thingumajig and force it on people saying "Here. This is what you need even if you think you don't." You'll neither make money nor help them. I guess Rand would argue that you should keep making things in your own bubble even if people say you are delusional, and die like the Cameron character. But if everybody lives life that way, are we supposed to magically arrive at consensus? Do the people with good sense just naturally become policy makers? Politically, it feels very naive.
It reminds me of what Louis CK was saying in some podcast. "I personally don't like all these comedians trying to game the algorithm. To me the direct interaction is important. I started doing comedy at 17 and I only broke out at 37. So you just gotta keep doing it. You don't game it." But then when the hosts were hurrahing him, he added "But I could have kept doing that and not broken out at 37. There's no guarantee you're going to make it. I could have just gone broke without anyone ever hearing of me. But that's the only thing I wanted to do." Throws up hands.
I loved Rand when I was in college and read Atlas Shrugged twice. I wasn’t mature enough to see the blind spots in her worldview but as any young artist, I so wanted to identify with the Roarks and Galts of the world. Thanks for the reminder that you can take positive messages out of literature, even if you don’t endorse every idea.
Ayn Rand! I likely read this book at about the same age as you did. I wasn't too impressed, in dim memory, and considered Ayn Rand to be a chucklehead. Hadn't thought about her, or the novel, in many years.
As a kid I have no idea how and when i picked up Ayn Rand but this book shaped the way I see the world from that day onwards. A lot happened in life growing up but the ideology, although subdued , nests deep within me still. You either love Ayn Rand's work or you don't.
Excellent diagnosis of The Fountainhead. I loved the book, around the same age as that boy, but hey wait, what was this about bombing a housing project because it not only ripped off your original design but also polluted it with architectural motifs you'd never use? It seemed out of character for Roark to suddenly turn Crusader. (The sexual "liberties" also made no sense to me. I'm tempted to write a short parody in which Peter Keating is Roark's bottom for a while.)
I clicked on the comments here wondering how much hate you'd be getting for saying anything good about Rand's writing. Not much, it seems. Well . . . good.
A lot of people find her politically anathema for obvious reasons, but this in itself doesn't make her a bad writer. I think you could actually build a month's worth of a Creative Writing class out of sample passages from her work, some passages showing excellent writing, others awful writing. I think it was Ross Douthat--a devout Catholic who Rand would despise for that reason alone--who said of Atlas Shrugged that it "has atmosphere to burn."
As I comment in an overly introspective piece of my own,
".... why do I write the way I do, with characters moving through time, in places, building the atmospherics? Oddly, I think now that I'm manifesting something soaked into my brain from Ayn Rand—where her writing was undeniably competent, at least—in my early teens: Develop character and that all-important "willing suspension of disbelief" through atmosphere. Because, for all her faults (legion), she could do that."
I was kind of obsessed with Ayn Rand as a literary figure. I mean, that cigarette. Those staring eyes. Plus she was totally committed to her point of view/philosophy and got a lot of people to follow along. Just a fascinating person. I enjoyed reading both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (I'm okay with philosophy couched in narrative), though there were some things in AS that I questioned (and still do, even more, now that I'm decades older than when I read it.) The thing is, we need all kinds of people in the world. If the very few "Prometheus capitalists" succeed in gathering all the capital to themselves, then they've "won." But what is the world they are left with? If nobody else has any gold, who will be able to buy their train tickets and steel and really darn good cigarettes and perfect hamburgers? Supposedly, these Prometheuses pay a decent wage to the really good workers. Okay. But our current "Industrialists" want to make robots to do that work. We might actually need to think about this right now as the great inventors of our day roll out artificial intelligence. Should we reward excellence? Yes! For sure. On the other hand, people enjoy different things, and sometimes (often) the masses enjoy things that "experts" consider less than excellent. Who is to decide? The market, supposedly. So . . . IS the market really the best arbiter of, say, taste? No system is perfect. Ayn Rand certainly wasn't perfect. This story was fun to read and brought me back a few decades.
Thank you!
"If nobody else has any gold, who will be able to buy their train tickets and steel and really darn good cigarettes and perfect hamburgers?"
Stop whining. You'll be able to earn gold overnight by selling your body to some genius who'll knock you down and bonk you senseless. Actually, it's the long lecture that's the most painful part.
For my generation, Ayn Rand had fallen out of favor because of her promotion of a kind of proto-Libertarian selfish individualism. I was reminded of this by architect Stanley Tigerman's account of his brief meeting with Rand:
It was the uncompromising and individualist hero of Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” that inspired Stanley Tigerman to become an architect. “I read the book when I was about 12 or 13 … And I thought, this is what the fuck I’m going to do.” …
"When I saw in the Yale Daily News that Ayn Rand was giving a lecture, I got my buddies in the master’s class and we went to see her. Afterward, stupidly, forgetting her well-known antagonism towards selflessness, I went to introduce myself. I said ‘My name is Stanley Tigerman, I’m at the graduate school in architecture. Reading your book as a child really impacted my life and I just wanted to thank you for getting me here.’ And she looked at me in that New York snotty way, up and down, and said, ‘So what?'“
https://fnewsmagazine.com/2012/01/challenging-an-epoch/
What a classic Ayn Rand story! Thanks for sharing :)
I remember reading Tobias Wolff’s OLD SCHOOL, in which Rand is also a character, and she’s always saying this kind of stuff.
That's horrible. Not surprising considering who did it, but horrible. There is something to be said for kindness in this world and it doesn't need a dollar sign on it. (Perfect for her branding, though. Look, you are telling this story how many years later? She's beautifully, perfectly, excellently horrible.)
Given how much I loathed The Fountainhead (which I read at 14, I think), it's remarkable how much of it has stuck with me (I could say the same of Gone With the Wind, which, if possible, I hate even more). It's a testament to the writing that I still think about it, even if what I think is largely "how can you be building a temple to the human spirit when you hate other human beings so much?"
Of course, I also believe that living a life dedicated to serving others adds to your life rather than detracting from it, which I suspect explains much about why I became a librarian and not a Famous Writer.
I like the enthusiasm you write about Ayn Rand and understand that a 13-year-old boy could fall in love with this romantic novel. But for the 40-year-old woman to continue to be delighted with this rather primitive novel is not understandable to me. The novel was written by a Russian, a very ambitious emigre, in hard English, without any artistic nuance, with a simplistic sense of the novel. There is a positive hero, there is a negative hero, and there is an extremely beautiful woman between them. The positive hero is victorious with this good deal and a woman. This is a scheme of the novel, it's a scheme of Soviet Socialist Realism. I am surprised that somebody among adults continues to read this kind of literature.
Many critics have pointed out the resemblance between Rand’s work and Soviet social realism. I also have a soft spot for the latter—I enjoyed Gladkov’s Cement.
I have to be short. My second comment disappeared, and I don't know why. Mb, one Gladkov is interesting for a foreigner, but the hundreds of them made you howl. Andrei Platonov and others wrote differently. I won't bother you with the details of their tragic fate. Ayn Rand was young, smart, ambitious, and with good ideas, but without literary talent. She wrote about good, possessing reason, capitalists, and had a great success in this system. But she wasn't a talented writer; that is why she decided to be a philosopher. Here I stop, I am afraid, my text runs away from me. Thank you.
Thank you, Denis O’Neil and James J. for support of my opinion about that horrible writer, philosopher, and who else was she?- amoral woman.
Thank you for understanding.
Thank you, Joe David, Ronald Gordon, and two others, for reading my comment and agreeing with me. I was surprised that such an influential figure as Naomi Kanakia propagandized a mediocre writer as Ayn Rand.
Atlas Shrugged was a hugely significant book to me when I was 15, but the left-of-center circles that I travel in tend to treat you like a monstrous leper if you ever admit to appreciating Ayn Rand.
It’s not worth saying if nobody disagrees :)
Abandoning the dictatorship of consensus is the best feeling in the world. Maybe not the best - but it feels liberating. Some snarky people decided that the thing you like “sucks, actually” - alright, whatever
I've never read any Ayn Rand. My kid was assigned an SF book (called ANTHEM, maybe?) during middle school and the description of that was bananas.
Her real life as a cult leader was what always interested me.
"The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational."
https://mises.org/articles-interest/sociology-ayn-rand-cult
That's a dystopian novella, not a bad book (from my high school memory) but not great either. Reads more like a cartoonish propaganda piece about why socialism and pronouns will ruin society.
Hilariously, "these scary new pronouns will destroy society" is very explicitly the plot of "Anthem" -- except that society is conformist and oppressive, so this is a good thing.
Ayn Rand: the OG queer theorist!?!?
When I read things like this I of course say "yeah, people with vision who are true to themselves, that's how people should be!"
But then I remember how I feel about architects in the real world. They are notoriously arrogant. And what their assholery means is glass apartment towers that ruin street life and public buildings that make people feel unwelcome and alienated. So I don't know what to think.
I suppose I only feel this way about the built environment. In writing and visual art and fashion etc. the Roarks of the world are inspiring.
That’s why it’s called fiction.
Thank you for writing this! I started with Terry Goodkind's fantasy send-ups of Rand when I was in middle school as well, then graduated to The Fountainhead after reading blistering reviews of Faith of the Fallen which (accurately) noted that it was drawn from The Fountainhead in ways that were evident to people more worldly than I was. I found her total commitment to her ideology completely fascinating and delightful in ways that people in college with me in 2019 found moderately alarming, but... every time I read her work felt like a thrilling debate, in a sense, with someone who refuses to yield in sometimes-genuinely-persuasive ways that hone your own case and approach more sharply for it. Reading your thoughts on the subject has me reaching back for my old copy. This is a really lovely piece.
Oh I have read all those Terry Goodkind books too! The most Randian of them, Faith of the Fallen, was a guilty pleasure, though I don’t know if it would hold up, since I have never reread it as an adult.
I reread it about two weeks ago and loved it in a very different way than I did at twelve. Nicci is still my favorite character in any fantasy novel, ever, and I forced my wife to get up and look at the page when I re-encountered the most delightfully earnest line of dialogue ever written:
"As you know," Nicci said, "I am not a very good person."
It gets me every time. I was kicking my feet in the air and giggling the whole time. Felt like a sleepover in my childhood bedroom with old friends who are shockingly easy to talk to but occasionally remind you why they are old friends and not current friends. I loved every minute of it.
While Ayn Rand's concept about 'excellence' is interesting and provided controversary and sales at one time, it did little to enlighten the world about how one's world needs to operate. Her global concepts were misleading if not unrealistic. The Fountainhead might well be worth a read at college level, where debate should be the essence of learning (not at liberal schools, though), but it would hardly do a lot for a younger person who is and should be struggling with the basic skills that lead to 'success' in the most fundamental way. Reading, writing, arithmetic, coping with your immediate environment, adjusting to the prospect of supporting one's self and contributing to the small 'team' of which is your home, school and community. To suggest to a child that there is a level of excellence that he or she might achieve is to set one up for failure. Excellence? In who's eyes? Who is this judge that knows 'excellence' as no one else does? The person who believes ever society should be governed in such a way that every one is equal? Where does 'excellence' fit in there? Only with those who govern perhaps. Excellency. All others are doomed to mediocracy. At any rate, Ayn Rand fan or not, the essay was thought provoking. Confusion Breeds Confusion might have been an appropriate title for most of Rand's work.
I'm rereading and annotating Atlas Shrugged right now! There's something Rand in the air. I wish Atlas Shrugged had a villain as charismatic as Ellsworth Toohey, but there is something genuinely moving about Rand's clarity (and her commitment to clarity as a virtue) even if I don't agree with her economics.
Totally agree. The Fountainhead has one of the best character introductions ever and it's for Toohey. If I remember right, it says something like "When he was in school, he debated that the pen is mightier than the sword, and won. Then he debated for the opposite view and won again." Extreme competence, zero principles. And I also love that scene where he asks Roark, "I wonder what you think of me, Mr. Roark?" and Roark says "I don't think of you at all." Toohey really made me root for Roark.
I'll never forgive John Belushi for dying the same day that Rand did. She got about one hour of news coverage before his story inundated the airwaves.
Poor Ayn! Ultimately her reputation has probably lasted longer though.
Not-so-fun fact: C.S. Lewis died the same day JFK was assassinated.
This review was such a page turner though I've read the book. Loved it. I also related to the Johanna character quite a bit. My dad gave me a copy of The Fountainhead when I was 15 and said it was the best book he'd read in college, and I read it like gospel truth. I read Atlas Shrugged as well. I took away the lesson that if you believe in something and work extremely hard for it, success will come. I think that attitude helped me do very well academically (I thought I was going to be a mathematician and solve the Riemann hypothesis), and got me out of the small town I was born in.
But in college I realized there's a big difference between Roark and me. Roark didn't care whether people liked him. He didn't care what people thought was good. He decided what was good and kept pushing. I cared what people thought of me, but I kept pretending like I didn't. I was annoyed people weren't wowed by my idealism. I was turning into a jerk. At some point I realised that and changed, and I'm happy I did.
There's an argument for the middlebrow. Roark seems to act like beauty and truth is objective, and can never emerge from consensus, but that's not always true. If you're an entrepreneur trying to make people's lives better, you don't invent some thingumajig and force it on people saying "Here. This is what you need even if you think you don't." You'll neither make money nor help them. I guess Rand would argue that you should keep making things in your own bubble even if people say you are delusional, and die like the Cameron character. But if everybody lives life that way, are we supposed to magically arrive at consensus? Do the people with good sense just naturally become policy makers? Politically, it feels very naive.
It reminds me of what Louis CK was saying in some podcast. "I personally don't like all these comedians trying to game the algorithm. To me the direct interaction is important. I started doing comedy at 17 and I only broke out at 37. So you just gotta keep doing it. You don't game it." But then when the hosts were hurrahing him, he added "But I could have kept doing that and not broken out at 37. There's no guarantee you're going to make it. I could have just gone broke without anyone ever hearing of me. But that's the only thing I wanted to do." Throws up hands.
I loved Rand when I was in college and read Atlas Shrugged twice. I wasn’t mature enough to see the blind spots in her worldview but as any young artist, I so wanted to identify with the Roarks and Galts of the world. Thanks for the reminder that you can take positive messages out of literature, even if you don’t endorse every idea.
Ayn Rand! I likely read this book at about the same age as you did. I wasn't too impressed, in dim memory, and considered Ayn Rand to be a chucklehead. Hadn't thought about her, or the novel, in many years.
As a kid I have no idea how and when i picked up Ayn Rand but this book shaped the way I see the world from that day onwards. A lot happened in life growing up but the ideology, although subdued , nests deep within me still. You either love Ayn Rand's work or you don't.
Excellent diagnosis of The Fountainhead. I loved the book, around the same age as that boy, but hey wait, what was this about bombing a housing project because it not only ripped off your original design but also polluted it with architectural motifs you'd never use? It seemed out of character for Roark to suddenly turn Crusader. (The sexual "liberties" also made no sense to me. I'm tempted to write a short parody in which Peter Keating is Roark's bottom for a while.)
I clicked on the comments here wondering how much hate you'd be getting for saying anything good about Rand's writing. Not much, it seems. Well . . . good.
A lot of people find her politically anathema for obvious reasons, but this in itself doesn't make her a bad writer. I think you could actually build a month's worth of a Creative Writing class out of sample passages from her work, some passages showing excellent writing, others awful writing. I think it was Ross Douthat--a devout Catholic who Rand would despise for that reason alone--who said of Atlas Shrugged that it "has atmosphere to burn."
As I comment in an overly introspective piece of my own,
".... why do I write the way I do, with characters moving through time, in places, building the atmospherics? Oddly, I think now that I'm manifesting something soaked into my brain from Ayn Rand—where her writing was undeniably competent, at least—in my early teens: Develop character and that all-important "willing suspension of disbelief" through atmosphere. Because, for all her faults (legion), she could do that."
https://ismailhatago.substack.com/p/fiction-writing-its-ending-up-with