Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I've Never Read The Fountainhead

I read Atlas Shrugged, but just couldn't get through Ayn Rand's other long novel. From what I understand, it's about an architect. Rand really liked simplicity in architecture. Does anybody know if she was a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright?

For those that can't finish Atlas Shrugged, I recommend The Fountainhead as the cliff notes version.

The Fountainhead is worth the effort.....Ayn can get tiresome and preachy sometimes but she was mostly right.

Great book. It was also made into a movie. I think Gary Cooper played the lead role. If you don't want to read the full book. Get a copy of her book - For the New Intellectual - it has all of the really important passages of her works in one book with a short commentary explaining the scene and circumstances of the dialogue. To me the best parts are when the character - Ellsworth Toomy - I could be wrong on the name but it something like that - speaks to the soul of the collectivist and the individualist. It is brilliantly insightful writing.

As a matter of trivia did you know that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was part of her inner circle in the 40's and 50's?

No I wasn't aware Greenspan was a fan. I read the whole of Atlas Shrugged, which gets pretty draggy in places. I went to read The Fountainhead too, but couldn't get into it. I was just wondering if the main character was more or less based on Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect whose work I admire.

I've always thought that Wright was the model for the architect -but I've never seen any writings/analysis or commentary on her work that made that connection.

I'm a fan of her writing - read Anthem when I was in the 9th grade and was into Atlas Shrugged by 11th grade. Did you know that she gave a lecture at West Point in the '60's?

As I recall she died the same week as John Belushi, so her passing went largely unnoticed.

I took a Philosophy class in college, just for kicks. It kind of pissed me off when the prof thought she was so minor that he didn't even cover her or her discipline.

If I knew about West Point, I'd forgotten. She addressed the graduating class at the USAF Academy in the late 70's or early 80's. It was based on her book, Philosophy, Who Needs It? I think that was the title of her speech as well.