The Fountainhead: Part 3: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Gail Wynand holds a gun to his head, waiting to feel something. He doesn’t, so he lowers the gun. His day was just like many others, with nothing to give it special meaning. He purchased land in Long Island and wants to turn it into a development of small homes called Stoneridge, but he hasn’t yet picked an architect. He refused a call from Ralston Holcombe that morning, knowing that he wanted the job. Wynand spoke to Alvah Scarret and told him he didn’t like that the Banner was plugging Lois Cook’s vapid novel, The Gallant Gallstone, and he wanted to know who was behind it. Scarret insisted it was just “spontaneous” but said that Toohey might have suggested it. Wynand told him he would like it stopped.

Later that afternoon, Toohey came to see Wynand and suggested Peter Keating’s services for Stoneridge. Wynand wanted to know why he should take Toohey’s advice, and Toohey was angry, saying he was, after all, his “architectural expert.” Wynand asked Toohey not to confuse him with his readers. Toohey ended up laughing and told Wynand that Keating’s wife would be able to do a better job of convincing him. Wynand refused, and Toohey told him he’d sent him a present that might change his mind. 

That evening, Wynand had dinner with a beautiful woman he’s been sleeping with, and at the end of the meal, he tossed her a diamond bracelet and told her it was a “memorial” that was “more valuable than that which it commemorates.” He knew it was a horrible thing to do, but he also knew she wouldn’t refuse it, just like all the other women who had come before her.

After she left, Wynand thought about his early life. At 12, he’d been in a street gang that looted barges on the Hudson. He worked various jobs, including as a bootblack on a ferryboat. He’d taught himself to read and write by the age of 5, and he always asked lots of questions. At 13, he’d enrolled himself in a public school and left when he found it repetitious and boring. He realized that books separated the wealthy from the poor, and so he began to read voraciously. When he was 15, he’d been beaten up badly in a fight and crawled to a saloon for help. The saloonkeeper slammed the door in his face, not wanting to get mixed up in trouble. Years later, when he was the publisher of the Banner, Wynand caused the saloonkeeper to be ruined and drove him to suicide.

Wynand was 16 when his father died. He decided to join the papers and asked for work at the Gazette, but was initially turned away. He persevered, and was soon made a reporter and then an associate editor. When he was 21, he’d tried to defend an honest cop named Pat Mulligan who was being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. For help, he’d gone to a famous editor of a great newspaper, who’d written a moving editorial on personal integrity. The editor asked Wynand how he could remember “every piece of swill” he’d written. Wynand felt the man had taught him a lesson that he’d never forget—that integrity did not exist. Wynand then wrote “a brilliant editorial blasting Mulligan,” refusing to be a “sucker” like him.

Wynand schemed his way into owning the Gazette, and renamed it the Banner. He ran two ads for charitable causes—one, to raise money for scientific research, and another to help out a murderer’s lover who was pregnant. The story of the unwed mother raised over $1,000 while the scientist raised only $9. Wynand used these examples to illustrate to his staff what kind of paper the Banner would be. Its purpose, like a circus, was to “stun, to amuse and to collect admission.” When other newspaper publishers reproached him for the “debasement of the public taste,” Wynand had said it was not his job to “to help people preserve a self-respect they haven’t got.”

It was “impossible for Wynand not to do a job well” and he’d put his whole self into “[achieving] perfection in the unexceptional.” In the first years of the Banner, he spent his nights at work and “drove [his employees] like an army” and “drove himself like a slave.” He expanded his newspaper empire to many states, and diversified his investments. He was very public about his personal life, and often appeared on the pages of his newspapers with one mistress or another. He kept only one thing away from the public eye—his secret art gallery.

Wynand took great pleasure in breaking people who thought they possessed integrity. It began with Dwight Carson, a young writer who praised individualism. Wynand hired him and forced him to write a column in the Banner on “the superiority of the masses.” It was a dull column, and a waste of time and money, but Wynand insisted on it. He continued with many others in a similar vein, like hiring a poet to cover baseball and an atheist to write “on the glories of religion.” If anyone dared to refuse Wynand, they’d find themselves broke and desperate for employment “through a series of untraceable circumstances.” But once they were broken, Wynand continued to pay them even though he was no longer interested in them.

Wynand remembers Toohey’s present and unwraps it to find Mallory’s statue of Dominique. He immediately calls Toohey and asks him to come over. Toohey asks him if he wants to know the name of the model, but Wynand says he wants to know the name of the sculptor. Toohey is disappointed, and pretends to have forgotten. He tells Wynand that the statue is of Keating’s wife, and Wynand says that no matter how beautiful she is, she could never match the sculptor’s interpretation of her. Still, he agrees to meet her despite not understanding what exactly Toohey is after.