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THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905–1943
Rand had better luck with the New York Times, which gave The
Fountainhead the best review of her career, in May, just a month after the
book was released. Lorine Pruette called Rand “a writer of great power”:
“She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly,
beautifully, bitterly.” Pruette went beyond the novel’s style and
also praised its content, writing that readers would be inspired to think
“through some of the basic concepts of our times” and noting, “This is
the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”
A host of lesser newspapers echoed her words. A reviewer in Pittsburgh
said The Fountainhead “could conceivably change the life of anyone who
read it,” and the Providence Journal wrote, “With one book [Rand] at
once takes a position of importance among contemporary American
novelists.” The exceptions came primarily from more highbrow literary
outlets like the Times Literary Supplement, which found, “Miss Rand
can only create gargoyles, not characters,” and The Nation, where Diana
Trilling sniffed about the book’s caricatures. 41
By the summer The Fountainhead began to appear on best-seller lists,
driven both by review attention and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
Paterson undoubtedly played a role in the book’s early
success, for although she had declined to review The Fountainhead she
plumped Rand from the safe distance of her column, mentioning her
eight times in 1943. 42 In these years Paterson was at the height of her fame
as a book reviewer, and “Turns with a Bookworm” was valuable publicity
for Rand. Sales continued to grow into the fall, a development that
confi rmed Rand’s expectations but confounded most others, including
the business offi ce of her publisher. Against the advice of Rand’s editor,
the press had printed only a small fi rst run, expecting sales of ten thousand
books at maximum. Soon they were scrambling to keep up with
demand. By year’s end they had sold nearly fi fty thousand copies and
gone through six printings. That Bobbs-Merrill failed to anticipate the
book’s success is understandable. The Fountainhead is a strange book,
long, moody, feverish. Even after Rand’s furious last-minute editing it
took up nearly seven hundred pages.
What was it that readers found in The Fountainhead’s pages? At the
most basic level the book told an exciting story, and told it well. When
freighted with Rand’s symbolic connotations, architecture became exciting
and lively. In one striking scene Rand portrays a rebellious action by
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