What I mean is that for such events to even happen, the world would have to have a maximum of maybe a hundred people. While there are a lot of things happening, the events seem too fantastical. What bothered me the most about the story (not the philosophy) is that it is very limited in scope. The only difference is that the bad guy is not one, but many – it’s society. At its very essence, it is the story of the struggles of a good man against the unyielding principles of a bad one. It’s a slightly different take on ‘good guy versus bad guy’. The basic story of The Fountainhead is not really complicated or philosophical. Hopefully, that will help you determine whether you want to read this famous classic or not, and what to expect should you choose to read it.įirst, the story. So, I’m going to break down this review into a few different parts, addressing different elements of the entire reading experience that I had with The Fountainhead. But there were also days when I couldn’t put it down. It took me around 40 days to read the book, which is a really long time (for me) the main reason is that there were days when I just didn’t want to pick it up and read. If you try to read existing reviews of Ayn Rand’s epic, you’d generally find them polarising – people either love or hate it.

The Fountainhead is a sometimes cumbersome, always emotional, rollercoaster ride that people need to get on today more than ever before.

The Fountainhead is Ayn Rand’s epic about a traditional world and the man who challenged the very conventions of which it was comprised. And it tells the story of Gail Wynand, the epitome of the society against which Roark was pitted. It tells the story of Dominique Francon, a woman who loved Roark passionately but did everything she could to destroy him just so that the world wouldn’t. It tells the story of Peter Keating, a man who considered Roark his greatest enemy and attempted to defeat him at every turn. The Fountainhead tells the story of Roark, and of his trials and tribulations. And society has no choice but to destroy him because he’s too different. Roark refuses to compromise, refuses to bend under the will of society. But he doesn’t care for anything other than his work. He is brilliant in a time when the world is not ready for it. Howard Roark is a visionary architect in a city where individuality is unappreciated.

The fountain head book