The Early Ayn Rand

INGALLS: [Whipping the gun out] I told you not to move. [BRECKENRIDGE stops] Don't run, Walter. Take it straight for once. If you run — you'll only help me. I'm a good shot — and nobody would believe that I'd shoot a man in the back. [And now this is the real STEVE INGALLS — hard, alive, taut with energy, his voice ringing — the inventor, the chance-taker, the genius — as he stands pointing the gun at BRECKENRIDGE] Walter! I won't let you do to the world what you've done to all your friends. We can protect ourselves against men who would do us evil. But God save us from the men who would do us good! This is the only humanitarian act I've ever committed — the only one any man can ever commit. I'm setting men free. Free to suffer. Free to struggle. Free to take chances. But free, Walter, free! Don't forget, tomorrow is Independence Day!

[BRECKENRIDGE whirls around and disappears in the dark. INGALLS does not move from the spot, only turns without hurry, lifts the gun, and fires into the darkness]

[The spotlight vanishes. Blackout]

[When the full lights come back, INGALLS is sitting calmly in a chair, finishing his story. ADRIENNE stands tensely, silently before him]

INGALLS: I've told you this because I wanted you to know that I don't regret it. Had circumstances forced me to take a valuable life — I wouldn't hesitate to offer my own life in return. But I don't think that of Walter. Nor of Serge... Now you know what I am. [Rises, stands looking at her] Now, Adrienne, repeat it — if you still want me to hear it.

ADRIENNE: [Looking at him, her head high] No, Steve. I can't repeat it now. I said that I was inexcusably, contemptibly in love with you and had been for years. I can't say that any longer. I will say that I'm in love with you — so terribly proudly in love with you — and will be for years... and years... and forever... [He does not move, only bows his head slowly, accepting his vindication]

CURTAIN

"Do you think," Ayn Rand said to me when I finished reading, "that I would ever give the central action in a story of mine to anyone but the hero?"

The Fountainhead (unpublished excerpts)

1938

Editor's Preface

In 1938, after devoting about three years to architectural research, Ayn Rand started writing The Fountainhead. She finished in late 1942, and the novel was published the next year. In less than a decade, the book became world-famous; by now, it has sold more than six million copies. Ayn Rand's own view of The Fountainhead can be found in her introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition.

For this anthology, I have selected two sets of excerpts cut by Miss Rand from the original manuscript; these are the only unpublished passages of substantial length- Both are from the early part of the novel, written in 1938. As is true of the passages from We the Living, neither has received Ayn Rand's customary final editing, and the titles are my own invention.

"Vesta Dunning" is the story of Howard Roark's first love affair, with a young actress, before he found Dominique. In the manuscript, the story is interwoven with other plot developments; it is offered here as a continuous, uninterrupted narrative.

Vesta Dunning is an eloquent example of a person of "mixed premises," to use a term of Ayn Rand's. In part, Vesta shares Howard Roark's view of life; in part, she is a secondhander, willing to prostitute her talent in order to win the approval of others, a policy she tries to defend as a means to a noble end. Miss Rand cut Vesta from the novel, she told me, when she realized that there was too great a similarity between Vesta and Gail Wynand, the newspaper publisher (who also pursued a secondhander's course in the name of achieving noble ends). In some respects, there is a marked similarity between Vesta and Peter Keating, too; in fact, as the material makes plain, some of Keating's dialogue was written originally for Vesta.