Existentialism, Alienation, Sartre, and Ayn Rand

For the existentialist philosophers in the twentieth century, alienation was a natural theme—they talk about alienation that results from social pressures, mass culture, and modern technologies, and they often indulged in deifying the alienated individuals as men of virtue, rationality, and knowledge. I think, Ayn Rand’s fiction owes a debt to the existentialist deification of alienated individuals. In 1938, Jean-Paul Sartre published his novel Nausea in which the leading character is a tall, red-haired, alienated young man called Antoine Roquentin. In Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the leading character is Howard Roark, a tall, red-haired, alienated young man. I am not sure if Roark’s name and physical characteristics are inspired by Sartre’s Roquentin.