100 Most Popular Works of Fiction

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Flint

In short, Fountainhead is a better Ayn Rand book than Atlas Shrugged.

Roark isn't as cartoonish as the supermen from Atlas Shrugged, but the climax of the story is when he blows up a building that he doesn't own because it wasn't built to his specifications.


I have no problem with characters being temperamental artists flying into rages. I have a problem with that being proposed as an ideal to be emulated. It's funny Rand chose an architect to be the hero; there's hardly a more collectivist form of creative expression. A painter is unlimited in what they can put on a canvas, but an architect has to deal with a team of experts in their own fields, any one of which may point out a reason the architect's vision needs to be modified by reality.


The comic book analogy is apt. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are the comic-book mad scientists, who invented unobtainium and perpetual motion machines in their lairs. But an architect who moves to Galt's Gulch is just a doodler without his team.