The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand. First Edition.

Ayn Rand remains a controversial figure and, whatever your thoughts on her work are, her influence can't be denied. Born in Russia and twelve at the time of the Russian Revolution, she saw her family's life drastically changed for the worse under Bolshevik rule. This inevitably had a major influence on her thought. She later emigrated to the United States and published her first novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living, in 1936. It was set in Russia and explored the relationship between the individual and the state. During the 1940s, she became politically active, championing individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism, and opposing collectivism, statism and anarchism. She was critical of religion and faith, and viewed reason as the only means to acquire knowledge about the world. Her work was met with mixed reviews and has been largely ignored by academia, although she has seen increased interest in recent years.

The Fountainhead was Rand's second novel and cemented her status as a cultural celebrity of sorts. The manuscript was rejected by twelve publishers before an editor at Bobbs Merrill risked his job by publishing it in 1943. I actually don't think it's that great of a book in terms of literary artistry, and most critics thought it to be overly long and lacking sympathetic characters. But it became a bestseller and has since sold 6.5 million copies worldwide, having a lasting influence on American conservatives and libertarians. This is a later printing of the first edition:

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