“Roark’s Professional Life”

On this page, Rand laid out the events of Roark’s life, covered by the novel in chronological order by year. Of particular interest here is the listing for the “Housing Project” late in the story. By this time in early April 1938, Rand had, at last, identified the climax of the story: that Roark would need to blow up a housing project. This single event was sufficiently dramatic and (as she noted in her later biographical interviews) combined “a political issue and an architectural issue” (that of housing, as indicated to her by architect Ely Jacques Kahn), and all the main characters and “their chief conflicts or issues.”

Her notes in the left-hand margin of this chronology also mark out which events went in which of the novel’s four parts.