Club in Hollywood, was an extra in the film
The King of Kings
, wrote motion-picture scenarios, stuffed envelopes, waited on tables, and married Frank O’Connor, apainter, who is not to be confused with the short-story writer. (His painting of a skyscraper under construction adorns the cover of the deluxe edition of
The Fountainhead.
) In 1934 she and her husband moved to New York; in 1936 her first novel,
We the Living
, was published, and her play,
The Night of January 16
, a melodrama, ran seven months on Broadway. And she set to work—in architect Ely Jacques Kahn’s office—on her new book.
By late 1940 she had completed one-third of the manuscript, then entitled
Second-Hand Lives
, and been rejected by twelve publishers. When funds ran out, she went to work as a reader at Paramount Pictures; there she showed her book to the late Richard Mealand, Paramount story editor. Mealand, who loved it, showed it to Archibald Ogden, editor-in-chief of Bobbs; Ogden, who loved it, sent it to Indianapolis to Bobbs president D. L. Chambers; Chambers, who hated it, sent it back with orders not to buy it. “I do not care much for allegories myself,” he wrote, “I presume you will not wish to proceed further with your negotiations.” Ogden wrote back: “If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you.” To which Chambers wired: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign the contract.” Miss Rand signed—and received a modest one-thousand-dollar advance.
The final manuscript—seventy-five thousand words shorter than Miss Rand had written it—continued to displease Chambers. He suggested that the book be cut in half. Without telling Ogden, he ordered the first printing cut from twenty-five thousand copies to twelve thousand and insisted it be printed from type: there was no point in making plates for a book that would clearly never sell out its first printing.
And, of course, it did.
The Fountainhead
—the title was changed at Ogden’s suggestion—has become known in the trade as the classic cult book. The classic book that made its own way. “It was the greatest word-of-mouth book I’ve ever been connected with,” said Bobbs-Merrill’s trade-division sales manager, William Finneran. “Over the years, we spent about two hundred fifty thousand dollars in advertising it, and we might as well have plowed it back into profits for all the good it did for us.” Six slow months after publication—and its purchase by Warner Brothers for a film that starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal—sales began to build; ultimately, the book appeared on the best-seller list twenty-six times through 1945. “I did not know that I was predicting my own future,” Ayn Rand once wrote, “when I described the process of Roark’s success: ‘It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places.’ ”
As it happened, the places were not all that unpredictable. According to Finneran, the book first began to sell in small cities. A bookstore owner in Detroit told his customers he was not interested in their business unless they bought the book. A Friend of the public library in Cleveland demanded that the library buy twenty-five copies of it. A lady in Minneapolis gave it to all her friends and later claimed credit for the book’s sales. “It started out with people in their thirties emerging from the Depression,” said Finneran, “and I think if you put them through a computer you’d find they were people who have read three books in their whole lives, other than books they had to read in business, and the other two were
Gone with the Wind
and
Anthony Adverse.”
By 1950 an unorganized cult of Rand enthusiasts—none of whom, by the way, had missed the point—was at loose in the land. Miss Rand was then living in a house built by Richard Neutra in the San Fernando Valley, where she had moved six years
The King of Kings
, wrote motion-picture scenarios, stuffed envelopes, waited on tables, and married Frank O’Connor, apainter, who is not to be confused with the short-story writer. (His painting of a skyscraper under construction adorns the cover of the deluxe edition of
The Fountainhead.
) In 1934 she and her husband moved to New York; in 1936 her first novel,
We the Living
, was published, and her play,
The Night of January 16
, a melodrama, ran seven months on Broadway. And she set to work—in architect Ely Jacques Kahn’s office—on her new book.
By late 1940 she had completed one-third of the manuscript, then entitled
Second-Hand Lives
, and been rejected by twelve publishers. When funds ran out, she went to work as a reader at Paramount Pictures; there she showed her book to the late Richard Mealand, Paramount story editor. Mealand, who loved it, showed it to Archibald Ogden, editor-in-chief of Bobbs; Ogden, who loved it, sent it to Indianapolis to Bobbs president D. L. Chambers; Chambers, who hated it, sent it back with orders not to buy it. “I do not care much for allegories myself,” he wrote, “I presume you will not wish to proceed further with your negotiations.” Ogden wrote back: “If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you.” To which Chambers wired: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign the contract.” Miss Rand signed—and received a modest one-thousand-dollar advance.
The final manuscript—seventy-five thousand words shorter than Miss Rand had written it—continued to displease Chambers. He suggested that the book be cut in half. Without telling Ogden, he ordered the first printing cut from twenty-five thousand copies to twelve thousand and insisted it be printed from type: there was no point in making plates for a book that would clearly never sell out its first printing.
And, of course, it did.
The Fountainhead
—the title was changed at Ogden’s suggestion—has become known in the trade as the classic cult book. The classic book that made its own way. “It was the greatest word-of-mouth book I’ve ever been connected with,” said Bobbs-Merrill’s trade-division sales manager, William Finneran. “Over the years, we spent about two hundred fifty thousand dollars in advertising it, and we might as well have plowed it back into profits for all the good it did for us.” Six slow months after publication—and its purchase by Warner Brothers for a film that starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal—sales began to build; ultimately, the book appeared on the best-seller list twenty-six times through 1945. “I did not know that I was predicting my own future,” Ayn Rand once wrote, “when I described the process of Roark’s success: ‘It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places.’ ”
As it happened, the places were not all that unpredictable. According to Finneran, the book first began to sell in small cities. A bookstore owner in Detroit told his customers he was not interested in their business unless they bought the book. A Friend of the public library in Cleveland demanded that the library buy twenty-five copies of it. A lady in Minneapolis gave it to all her friends and later claimed credit for the book’s sales. “It started out with people in their thirties emerging from the Depression,” said Finneran, “and I think if you put them through a computer you’d find they were people who have read three books in their whole lives, other than books they had to read in business, and the other two were
Gone with the Wind
and
Anthony Adverse.”
By 1950 an unorganized cult of Rand enthusiasts—none of whom, by the way, had missed the point—was at loose in the land. Miss Rand was then living in a house built by Richard Neutra in the San Fernando Valley, where she had moved six years
Similar Books
