History Literature / TheFountainhead

** Later in the book, the word "bromide" becomes one. Howard Roark's name might also be used this way in places.

* EveryoneWentToSchoolTogether: Keating is two years ahead of Roark in architecture school.

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: Mike's real name is Sean Xavier Donnigan, but no one ever calls him that because they've forgotten it.

** Toohey defends Steven Mallory, the sculptor who tried to shoot him. Letting him rot in jail or be executed would have been better for Toohey since Mallory ends up working for Howard, the greatest thorn in Toohey's side. Mallory doesn't appreciate it because he was able to see who Toohey what the man really was.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Roark marries Dominique and the two live Happily Ever After, but Wynand is utterly broken and defeated. Toohey loses his job as
columnist for Wynand, but quickly gets hired to write for a magazine. We never find out exactly what becomes of Keating after the Cortlandt trial, but it's strongly hinted that his career as an architect is completely blown to hell.]]

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Roark marries Dominique and the two live Happily Ever After, but Wynand is utterly broken and defeated while Toohey is relatively unfazed. We never find out exactly what becomes of Keating after the Cortlandt trial, but it's strongly hinted that his career as an architect is completely blown to hell.]]

* EveryoneWentToSchoolTogether: Howard and Peter are two years apart in architecture school.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Howard Roark and Dominique Roark live Happily Ever After, but Gail Wynand is utterly broken and defeated, Ellsworth Toohey is relatively unfazed, and we never find out what became of poor, poor Peter Keating.]]

* CrossingTheBurntBridge: Inverted; the "Banner" destroyed the Stoddard Temple, and its editor marries Dominique Francon. Thus, Gail is the only person that Howard comes close to loathing. Howard still goes to meet Gail when the guy wants a house for himself and his wife, preparing to refuse on principle. Gail only later learns that he should have done his homeworkon the man.

* SpringtimeForHitler: At one point, Roark is hired by a real estate company to design a resort complex and does such a good job that the place is fully booked within a month of opening. He later learns that the company wanted it to fail and chose him because they thought he was the worst architect around.

* TrueArtIsIncomprehensible:[[invoked]] Mocked.

* {{Bromance}}: Roark and Wynand, Roark and Mallory, Mike and Mallory. All of these can possibly be interpreted as HoYay by at least some readers. The author may not have intended this, but Roark and Wynand's Bromance comes across as pretty, ahem, subtexty (admittedly, this is a subjective judgement). Roark and Steve Mallory is total hurt/comfort material. Even the Objectivist scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra devoted a chapter in his "Ayn Rand, Homosexuality and Human Liberation" to "Male Bonding in the Randian Novel."

* OnlySaneMan: Austin Heller in the whole story. He gives Roark his first architecture job, tries to financially support him, and hire a defense team at the Stoddard trial. Austin gives a regular WhatTheHellHero speech to Roark for being so damn stubborn

* NotGoodWithPeople: Most of the heroic characters, except for Austen Heller.

** Alvah Scarret is a YesMan to Gail, being the MoralPragmatist who sells the papers. Then he learns that Gail has a habit of finding men with integrity and breaking them because he wants to believe no one sticks to their convictions. Alvah's horrified when Gail's first victim, Dwight Carson, becomes a dipsomaniac (alcoholic), two other men become drug addicts and one becomes suicide. He tries with no avail to advise Gail that his hobby is akin to murder. Gail of course, doesn't listen. It gets worse than Gail fires Dwight, after breaking the man thoroughly.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: Peter's mother tries to encourage him to have everything in life, to marry for politics and increase his career. She's then shocked when realizing that Peter is succumbing to depression after Dominique divorced him, and Peter chose to sell her to Wynand to get a nice project. With some guilt, Mrs. Keating tries to encourage him to get married, and suggests Katie. In most romantic comedies and stories, Peter would reconcile with Katie and find his redemption. Instead, the mere idea disgusts and exhausts him because he spurned Katie to please his mother and knows now that trying to do that was a waste of his life. Katie also tells him calmly, after they encounter each other on the street and stop for a bite, that it may have been what she wanted but she's got a job now traveling and Peter himself admits whatever they had is dead in the water.
** At the end of the book, when Peter is thoroughly disgraced and unemployed, he takes up painting, which was always his real passion. He shows his paintings to Roark, who sadly but honestly tells Peter that the paintings aren't any good, and it's probably too late in Peter's life for him to truly excel at it. Peter respects Roark's honestly and acknowledges he had more or less come to that conclusion himself.

* ProtagonistCenteredMorality: Everyone who's poor deserves it except of course Henry Cameron, whose impoverished circumstances are because of eeeevil classical architecture. Then there's Howard Roark, the hero, who engages in [[AuthorAppeal sex that has]] {{questionable consent}} and domestic terrorism, yet it's treated as a good thing when despite spending eight pages in a Motive Rant about how and why he did the latter, he's [[HollywoodLaw found not guilty anyway]].

* GoodCannotComprehendEvil: More like [[DownplayedTrope "principled cannot comprehend unprincipled"]], but Roark has difficulty understanding the mindset of people who prioritize winning the approval of others over doing the work they love as well as possible. {{Lampshaded}} by Steven Mallory, who describes Roark as a man so healthy that he can't imagine what it's like to be sick, and later by Peter Keating in a drunken rant.