 In a 1968 introduction to The Fountainhead, Rand was forthright about the religious energies that pulsed through her work. She described the book's Nietzschean roots and registered both her disagreement with the German philosopher and her desire to convey his exalted sense of life in her novel. Rand argued, "Religion's monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life." According to Rand, the primary emotions that religion had usurped were exaltation, worship, reverence, and a sense of the sacred. She maintained that these emotions were not supernatural in origin, but were "the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral ideal." It was these emotions she wanted to stir with The Fountainhead, "without the self-abasement required by religious definitions." Rand intended her books to be a sort of scripture, and for all her emphasis on reason it is the emotional and psychological sides of her novels that make them timeless. Reports of Ayn Rand's death are greatly exaggerated. For many years to come she is likely to remain what she has always been, a fertile touchstone of the American imagination.
Jennifer Burns
Goddess of the Market, pp285-286, as quoted by Ellen Stuttle
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