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INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! 41
would be an individualist like Rand, someone who wanted to create
certain ideas, books, or movies rather than attain a generic level of
success. Within days Rand had identifi ed the differences between her
and the neighbor as “the basic distinction between two types of people
in the world.” She visualized the dim outlines of two clashing characters,
the second-hander and the individualist, who would drive the plot
and theme of her next novel. 2
Rand put these ideas on hold for the next few years, her energies absorbed
with the move to New York. Once she got started again she was methodical
in her approach. For once, money was no object. Much as she hated
Woods, the producer’s populist touch gave Rand what she wanted the most:
enough money to let her write full time. Some weeks royalties from Night of
January 16th could reach $1,200 (in today’s dollars, about $16,000), income
that freed both Ayn and Frank from paid work. 3 By then she had determined
that the background of her book would be architecture, the perfect
melding of art, science, and business. With the help of librarians at the New
York Public Library she developed an extensive reading list on architecture,
fi lling several notebooks with details that would color her novel. As with
her earlier work, she also wrote extensive notes on the theme, the goal, and
the intention of the project she called “Second-Hand Lives.”
In its earliest incarnations the novel was Rand’s answer to Nietzsche.
The famous herald of God’s death, Nietzsche himself was uninterested
in creating a new morality to replace the desiccated husk of Christianity.
His genealogy of morals, a devastating inquiry into the origins, usages,
and value of traditional morality, was intended to clear a path for the
“philosophers of the future.” 4 Rand saw herself as one of those philosophers.
In her fi rst philosophical journal she had wondered if an individualistic
morality was possible. A year later, starting work on her second
novel, she knew it was.
“The fi rst purpose of the book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning,
egoism as a new faith,” she wrote in her fi rst notes, which were prefaced
by an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Her novel
was intended to dramatize, in didactic form, the advantages of egoism
as morality. Howard Roark, the novel’s hero, was “what men should be.”
At fi rst he would appear “monstrously selfi sh.” By the end of the book
her readers would understand that a traditional vice—selfi shness—was
actually a virtue. 5
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