She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.

In 1941 Paramount Pictures produced a movie version of the play. The novel centers on an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers"—those who attempt to live through others placing others above self. Afterward Ayn Rand turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Ayn Rand (pron. In politics Ayn Rand condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism instead supporting a minarchist limited government and laissez-faire capitalism which Ayn Rand believed was the only social system that protected individual rights.