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A NEW CREDO OF FREEDOM 85
site of the Wynand building. She takes an elevator up the side of the
building, looking above to see “the sun and the sky and the fi gure of
Howard Roark” (694). Her closing words were typed just before the fi rm
deadline of January 1, 1943.
Now came the hard part. Both Rand and Ogden knew the manuscript
was too long. Rand wanted to write everything down and then
edit from there. She had only a few months to do it, for Bobbs-Merrill
planned to release The Fountainhead in the spring. After nearly a year
of nonstop writing Rand was now sleepy and unfocused when she sat
at her desk. When she visited a doctor to consult about her chronic
fatigue, he offered Benzedrine as a solution. At midcentury Benzedrine
was a widely prescribed amphetamine and had a cult following among
writers and artists. Jack Kerouac produced his masterwork On the Road
in a three-week, Benzedrine-induced frenzy. Similarly Rand used it to
power her last months of work on the novel, including several twenty-
four-hour sessions correcting page proofs. 32
Desperate to publish, Rand set aside her usual dislike of editorial
advice and embraced many of the changes Ogden suggested. Most signifi
cant among these was the book’s name. Rand’s working title was
“Second Hand Lives.” When Ogden pointed out that this title highlighted
her villains rather than her heroes, Rand agreed it must go. Her
next choice, “The Mainspring,” had been recently used. A thesaurus led
her to “fountainhead,” a word that never appears in the novel. Another
important editorial force was Paterson. She advised Rand to prune all
unnecessary adjectives, a change that would have gutted the novel. Rand
did, however, fi nd some of her suggestions useful. Following Paterson’s
advice, she weeded out proper names like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and
Robespierre from Roark’s courtroom speech to avoid tying the book to
one historical moment. 33 The principles of her book were transcendent,
Paterson reminded her.
In these last frantic months Rand also transformed Howard Roark.
She decided to eliminate the character of Vesta Dunning, Roark’s love
interest before Dominique. The scenes between Vesta and Roark were
among the fi rst Rand wrote in 1938. Close in spirit to Rand’s fi rst heroes,
the early Roark was cold and cruel, treating Vesta with dramatic indifference.
By deleting these scenes in 1943 Rand softened Roark’s character,
making him less misanthropic and more heroic. Eliminating Vesta also
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