Bibliofreakblog

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I’ve been thinking about this book for a couple of reasons lately.  The first is that they did a parody of it on The Simpsons where Maggie’s preschool teacher wouldn’t let her build the kind of towers she wanted to (this is the 2009 version in which she goes to Mediocri-tots, not the 2007 version where she attends the Ayn Rand School for Tots).  Before the story started, Marge mentioned it to Lisa, who said of this book, “Isn’t that the Bible for right-wing losers?”  In a very real way, she was right.  I think that that is the perception of this book.

Here’s my own experiences with it in the last month or so.  

I tried joining the writing website urbanis.com.  It was kind of a bust.  The writing on the site was mediocre and people argued with your criticism.  I’m not saying that the couple of stories I put on there were stellar, but people were kind of nasty if they didn’t like what you said about them.  One guy had a little essay that was mostly crap about God and evolution and quoted Vonnegut and it was such unformed and uninformed b.s. I wasn’t even going to comment, except his last paragraph he started talking about pyramids and cathedrals.  I recommended a couple books he should read, including The Ancestor’s Tale, The Unfolding of Language, and The Fountainhead (btw, I wasn’t plugging my blog because this was actually just before I started it).  He said he’d read Dawkins before, and “been forced to read” Rand in school and found her pretentious.  I agreed that Rand was pretentious, but directly relating to the paragraph in question, where he talked about man’s yearning blah blah blah through architecture, I thought that The Fountainhead directly related.

Here’s my second encounter.  There was some list going around on Facebook that was purportedly from the BBC of 100 books.  We all quickly deduced that it was not, in fact, from the BBC, because it had both the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet on there, a long with some questionable entries.  But the point was not books that you should have read, but how many had your read.  I think I got about a third of them.  Anyways, some of us decided to make our own lists of twenty books everyone should read.  I had The Fountainhead on mine.  My very intelligent, well-read, Fulbright scholar friend commented that he had an issue with that choice (this was particularly interesting because we had about five or so of the same entries and some similar honorable mentions) because he’d never been able to get through Atlas Shrugged, though had tried three times.  My husband, Jason, disagreed.  He said that he’s for Rand, if you look at her in a “life-affirming” way.

Indeed, I remember when I gave The Fountainhead to Jason to read in high school.  We were only tentatively friends at the time and he’d just gotten out of a long, emotionally tumultuous relationship.  He said when he got to the part where Roark decides that having built the temple was the most important part, he would have ripped the page out and put it in his pocket if it were his own book.

And I was a super bleeding-heart liberal and I credit this book with making me more objective (not to be confused with Objectivism).  

Well, I’ve ranted on, so instead of talking more about the book, I’m going to let The Simpsons do my work for me.  LOL, it must not have changed me all that much.

Buy The Fountainhead on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine by Thomas Paine
The Prince by Niccolo Machiaveli 
Basic Writings of Nietzsche by Frederick Nietzsche
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
1984 by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 – normal
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Brave New World  by Aldus Huxley
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West
Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather 

Other Works by Ayn Rand:

Atlas Shrugged
Anthem
We the Living
The Night of January 16th 
The Journals of Ayn Rand 
Russian Writings on Hollywood
The Romantic Manifesto
For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction 
The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers
The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers
Three Plays
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Philosophy: Who Needs It 
The Ayn Rand Column: Written for the Los Angeles Times
The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution 
The Virtue of Selfishness 
 

With Robert Mayhew:

Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A