I see the career of novelist and would-be philosopher Ayn Rand as tragic. She had an idea for an engaging fable about an architect who valued his creativity above money or recognition. She could have made something good out of this.
Rand was an iconoclast who created and quickly destroyed her own idol.
Her architect hero, who has been blacklisted, agrees to design an apartment complex to house poor people, doing this anonymously and for free, asking only that it be built to his specifications. So horrified is he that his beloved apartment complex has been marred by inferior designers, he dynamites it. This allows him to plead his case in court,which vandalism, possibly a well-written letter to the Editor or Op Ed piece, could have accomplished without a threat of prison. At the end of the story, the newspaper publisher who has persecuted him apologizes and offers him a fat check to design a monument in the form of an office building named after the publisher. The architect, it seems, has forgotten the apartment complex he nearly martyred himself for and he grabs the check. He designs a skyscraper where the men in gray suits who were afraid to hire him would someday work. Possible closing theme for a remake of the movie - "Corporate Anthem" by DEVO.
Conservative columnist and publisher William F. Buckley, who admitted that he enjoyed The Fountainhead, called Rand's Atlas Shrugged "a thousand pages of ideological fabulism," adding, "I had to flog myself to read it." He said that people who followed Rand's Objectivism were going to Hell.
Of the various ways Roark could have gotten himself arrested, he could have thrown buckets of paint at Cortlandt, explaining to the arresting officer that his abstract expressionism added to the eclectic design. However, this would have constituted humor, which Rand never allowed in her writing.