The books were initially not big sellers. Photograph: Alberto E Rodriguez/Getty Images Before the revolutionīorn in Russia before the revolution, resident in the United States since 1925, Rand gathered a group of acolytes around her that included Alan Greenspan, future Federal Reserve chairman, while she was working on the paving slab that became Atlas Shrugged. Two more Rand novels landed in the top 10.ĭirector Zack Snyder, who has announced he will adapt Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead.

Few literary departments will have anything to do with Rand but, in 1999, when Random House ran a poll to discover the greatest novel of the 20th century, Atlas Shrugged ended up at No 1, with The Fountainhead just behind in second place. You know that trust-fund radical – here he's called something like Odhrán Crosby-Sporkington – who presses David Foster Wallace on every uninterested woman? He is nothing to the sinister proto-Galt who enjoys ostentatiously reading The Fountainhead in public places. Yet the works of Ayn Rand have somehow become among the most influential on American campuses. If life were a thousand times longer, it would still be too short to make any similar accommodation with Rand's turgid prose. I watched four series of The West Wing to confirm I couldn't stand the thing. I have read none of The Fountainhead and only around 150 pages of Atlas Shrugged. (With apologies to people who don't like Marmite.)Ī confession is due. You either hate her books or you're a maniac. Mentor to a thousand half-bright libertarians, she has – with turgid bullet-stoppers such as Atlas Shrugged – gradually emerged as a literary version of Marmite. The late Ms Rand is something else altogether. The director of Batman Vs Superman and Legend of the Sucker Punch has, not entirely unfairly, come to stand in for all that's wrong with big-budget, fan-servicing comic-book movies. There's something special about both these people. It's not just that a much-reviled director is taking on a much-reviled author. The phrase 'Zack Snyder's The Fountainhead' reads like the answer to a question involving the words 'worst ever…' on Mock the Week. The skinny that's got the cinema world abuzz concerns Zack Snyder's plan to direct a film version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Forget the non-news that Danny Boyle will be directing Daniel Craig in the next James Bond film.

The fountainhead novel