Celebrating The Fountainhead: Q&A with Shoshana Milgram

This year we celebrate eighty years since the publication of The Fountainhead, and at the next ARI Member Roundtable, on February 25, we’ll hear about episodes in Ayn Rand’s life that occurred while she was writing the novel. My guest will be Shoshana Milgram, an expert on Rand’s life and works, and we’ll focus on people and events that have not been much discussed previously.

I’m excited to welcome Dr. Milgram back as a speaker at this month’s Roundtable. On one prior occasion, we discussed Ayn Rand’s work on the teleplay for Atlas Shrugged, and on another, Dr. Milgram helped construct a program of dramatic readings from Rand’s fiction, in partnership with Ann Ciccolella of Austin Shakespeare. Dr. Milgram is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, specializing in narrative fiction and film. She has lectured on Ayn Rand at Objectivist and academic conferences, and has published on Rand, Hugo and Dostoevsky. 

The Roundtables are monthly online events exclusively for ARI Members. The events feature a conversation with a guest speaker, followed by hosted breakout rooms for discussion and socializing. We started the Roundtables during the pandemic, and we’ve continued them because they are a wonderful way for us to connect with ARI supporters — and for them to connect with each other.

Past guest speakers have included psychologists Ellen Kenner and Edwin Locke; Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic; Keith Schact, an ed-tech entrepreneur; and Michael Berliner, Jeff Britting and Audra Hilse, members of the Ayn Rand Archives team. We concluded last year’s season of Roundtables by sharing audio of an exclusive Q&A with Ayn Rand, recorded in 1979 in her apartment.

Invitations to the February 25 event have already gone out to ARI Members, and if you’d like to become a Member, we’d welcome your support.