Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.

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.