Books

What Courtney Love Is Reading: The Fountainhead


Yep, Faze has been around a long time, and this column had us asking the stars of the time what books they were reading or had recently read AND that they were super-excited about. Then we’d tell you a little more about the book. In this installment we put the question to Courtney Love, wife of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and rock star in her own right (her album Live Through This is one of the best of the 1990s, go check it out).

Courtney Love

Courtney Love is particularly inspired by The Fountainhead  written by Ayn Rand (‘Ayn’ rhymes with ‘Mine’).

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

A young architect struggles to break free of society’s conventions, and falls into a violent, explosive love affair with a woman bent on defeating him. It is the story of an innovator – architect Howard Roark – and his battle against a tradition-worshipping society. In Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as “he could be and ought to be.”

The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers. When it was accepted by Bobbs-Merrill and finally published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.

Ayn Rand named her philosophy, “Objectivism” and described it as a philosophy for living on earth. Objectivism is an integrated system of thought that defines the abstract principles by which a man must think and act if he is to live the life proper to man.

Following its publication in 1943, The Fountainhead earned an immediate place in the literature of the 20th century. Setting forth Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, it forever changed the thinking of an entire generation, and inspired a new kind of intellectually ambitious literature.

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
— Ayn Rand

For more on Ayn Rand visit www.aynrand.org

 


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