In the spring of 1935, Howard Roark completes a summer resort, Monadnock Valley, in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Monadnock Valley is both an artistic and a commercial triumph. Customers love Roark’s concept and design, and they flock to it. A young college graduate sees it as he rides his bicycle through wooded trails. Despite his youth, he is disillusioned by what he has been taught in college—that an individual owes selfless service to the community, that society comes first, and that virtue resides in sacrifice for one’s fellow men. He finds a sense of exultation only amidst the beauties of nature. Among the works of men—surrounded by the pool halls and billboards—he experiences a sense of despair. He does not want to despise man or the works of man; he wants to admire them. But he finds little worthy of admiration. The young man had always wanted to write music, because the special sense of life that he finds so generally elusive has been captured by mankind’s greatest composers. He thinks that men have not found the words for it, nor the deed, nor the thought, but they have found the music. He seeks to find the promise of that music made real in some act of man on earth. He’s not looking for sacrifice or suffering or selflessness—but for joyousness. He does not ask his brothers or sisters to work for his happiness, but to show him theirs. He needs the sight of it, because he needs to know that it is possible. He wants to see human achievement made real. The knowledge of it will give him courage for his own. At the top of a hill, he sees the broad expanse of a valley below him. He sees houses of plain fieldstone—like the rocks jutting from the green hillsides—“and of glass, great sheets of glass used as if the sun were invited to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry.” He knows, by looking at the hillside, that someone understood how to build without altering the natural contours or beauty of the terrain. The houses were separate, cut off from each other, utterly distinct and individualized. The young man gapes. Then he notices that he is not alone. Some steps away from him, a man sits on a boulder and gazes at the valley below. He is absorbed in the sight. The man is tall and gaunt and has orange hair. The college graduate approaches the man respectfully and asks him if the sight before them is real. The man replies that is. It’s not a movie set or a trick, the younger man wants to know. No, Roark, the orange-haired man tells him. It’s a summer resort just completed that will be opened in a few weeks. “Who built it?” the boy wants to know. “‘I did.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Howard Roark.’ ‘Thank you,’ said the boy.” The boy knows that the perceptive eyes looking at him understand everything that those words convey. Roark bows his head, in acknowledgment. The boy wheels his bicycle down the slope of the hill toward the houses in the valley, and Roark looks after him. “He had never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.”
Roark had not understood the reasons that he was hired to build Monadnock Valley. He had heard of it a year and a half before, in the fall of 1933. He had gone to see Caleb Bradley, who headed the company building the resort, and who was doing a good deal of promotion. Bradley’s face reveals no flicker of emotion as Roark describes his plan, but he asks one strange question. Bradley asks if Roark was the architect who designed the Stoddard Temple. When Roark answers that he was, Bradley states it was funny he hadn’t thought of Roark himself. Several days later, Bradley calls and asks Roark to explain his idea to Bradley’s partners. Roark presents his plan: the worst curse of poverty, he says, is the lack of privacy. The rich can enjoy their summer vacations because they have their private estates to which they can retire. But people of good taste and small income have no place to go to escape the crowded conditions of the city. As Roark explains how to build cheaply not one huge hotel but many small, private ones, the men exchange occasional glances. Roark feels certain that they are the type of glances people exchange when they cannot laugh at the speaker aloud. But it could not have been that, he thought, because several days later he signs a contract to build the Monadnock Valley Resort.
Roark remembers his experience building the Stoddard Temple, and he demands Bradley’s initials on every drawing that comes out of his drafting rooms. Bradley is eager to initial, sign, and approve. Beyond keeping a close watch over the budget, he is not involved himself in the project and leaves Roark in complete control. Roark is able to discover little about Bradley, and then loses interest in him altogether. He is building his greatest assignment. For a year, he lives at the construction site. Steven Mallory does the fountains and all the sculptural work for the resort, and he comes to live at the site long before he is needed. Roark’s old draftsmen come to work for him again, some leaving better jobs in the city. When Mike Donnigan arrives with the crew of electricians, Mallory observes that the look on Mike’s face matches Mallory’s feeling that this project is more than a building, it is a crusade. Slowly, over the course of a year, the buildings of the resort are completed. But occasionally, Mr. Bradley visits the construction site, smiles blandly and departs, leaving Mallory with an unexplained anger—and fear.
