Louis Sullivan - Sullivan in Fiction

Sullivan in Fiction

That the fictional character of Henry Cameron in Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead was similar to the real-life Sullivan was noted, if only in passing, by at least on contemporary journalist.

More recent study of Rand's posthumously published journal notes as well as a close comparison of the respective careers of the real and fictional architects by Heynick has explored this connection in some detail. Although Rand's journal notes contain in toto only some 50 lines directly referring to Sullivan, it is clear from her mention of Sullivan's Autobiography of an Idea (1924) in her 25th anniversary introduction to her earlier novel We the Living (first published in 1936, and unrelated to architecture) that she was intimately familiar with his life and career. Indeed, the term "the Fountainhead," which appears nowhere in Rand's novel proper, is found twice (as "the fountainhead" and later as "the fountain head") in Sullivan's autobiography, both times used metaphorically.

The fictional Cameron is, like Sullivan (whose physical description he matches), a great innovative skyscraper pioneer late in the 19th century who dies impoverished and embittered in the mid-1920s (which is still early in the novel). Cameron's rapid decline is explicitly attributed to the wave of classical Greco-Roman revivalism in architecture in the wake of the 1893 Columbian World's Exhibition, just as Sullivan in his autobiography attributed his own fall to the same event.

The major difference between novel and real life was in the chronology of Cameron's relation with his protégé Howard Roark, the novel's hero, who eventually goes on to redeem his vision. That Roark's uncompromising individualism and his innovative organic style in architecture was drawn from the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright is clear from Rand's journal notes, her correspondence and various contemporary accounts. However, in the novel, the 23-year-old Roark, a generation younger than the real-life Wright, becomes Cameron's protégé in the early 1920s, when Sullivan was long in decline. The young Wright, by contrast, was Sullivan's protégé for seven years, beginning in 1887, when Sullivan was at the height of his fame and power. The two architects would sever their ties in 1894 due Sullivan's angry reaction to Wright's private moonlighting in breach of contract. After decades of estrangement, Wright would again become close to (the now destitude) Sullivan in the early 1920s, the time when Roark first comes under (the likewise impoverished) Cameron's tutelage in the novel. Wright, however, was now in his fifties. Nevertheless, both the young Roark and middle-aged Wright had in common at that time that they both faced a decade of struggle ahead. After the triumphs earlier in his career, Wright came increasingly to be viewed as a has-been -- until his career would experience a renaissance in the latter half of the 1930s with such projects as Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax complex.