Character name lists

Part of Rand’s efforts to make the novel what she wanted it to be involved choosing the names for each character. Another example of this appeared briefly in a previous item. On this page, she used a similar process, writing out lists of many possible names for a particular character until she decided on the one she liked best.

For these lists, it is interesting to note that although in many cases her selections ended up being the ones used in the novel (Keating, Alvah, Cameron), that is not always the case. For a friend of Roark, she identified a few acceptable options here, but then used none of them, going with “Mike” instead.

As noted for a previous item, Rand sometimes decided on a general type of character that she wanted in the novel, and then identified a figure to help temporarily concretize that character. We see another example of such a placeholder here, where she uses “Mencken” (H. L. Mencken) as a temporary stand-in for Austin Heller’s character.