When I finish a book, I'm always eager to learn what other people thought of it, so I usually spend some time reading reviews of it online. I also usually get frustrated that most reviews spend a lot of time summarizing the book, which I'm not interested in. After reading The Fountainhead, I got frustrated as usual, and then happened to find this book and decided to try it. It scratched that itch a lot better than reading reviews online! I think I'm going to try looking for meta books more often.

All the essays in this book seemed extremely well-researched and thoughtful. I especially liked the essays on the history of The Fountainhead because I learned a lot of objective facts from those. My favorite two described the major revisions Rand made to the Fountainhead, and the process of turning it into a movie. I liked seeing how different the final book was from both the initial draft and screenplays written by people other than Rand.

My main complaint about this book is that not a single essay had anything negative to say about The Fountainhead, or even anything neutral or less than glowing. It would have been nice to get a more balanced set of perspectives.

Another minor complaint is that it included discussion of Atlas Shrugged and a significant spoiler for We the Living. I've already read We the Living, and there weren't really spoilers per se for Atlas Shrugged, but I prefer to know almost nothing about a book before I start reading it, and now I know things like who the main character is and how its theme compares to The Fountainhead's.

Not my kind of book, I'm not into spirituality but I liked it, it made me realize things about myself. Thank you ❤️

I decided to read The Fountainhead again after many years and so I thought I'd read this collection of essays about the book as well. I read the same authors' collection of essays on We the Living when I read that book again last year. It was excellent, offering many insights to the novel, and this collection is similarly intriguing.

The most interesting essay Shoshana Milgram's The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel which chronicles Ayn Rand's development of the novel, the editorial changes she made along the way and her intellectual development along the way. I also particularly liked John Bayer's The Fountainhead and the Spirit of Youth.

If there is a drawback to the book, it is that the book is relentlessly uncritical and hagriographic. But this is not surprising as the book is written by a collection of writers associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, the "official" organization charged with preserving her legacy.

That said, the book is an interesting read.