When Ayn Rand spent approximately twenty years writing two books—one, The Fountainhead and two, Atlas Shrugged, she took Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and completed the work that the German philosopher was unable to due to madness. In The Fountainhead was the first real attempt to provide an Übermensch to ever occur as a fully functioning character. The novel published in 1943 was part of a growing trend for human beings to grapple with the Übermensch concept.

Ayn Rand further flushed out the Übermensch concept and put them on the pages of her novel, The Fountainhead—which to me is one of the greatest novels of all time. Rand would then further perfect the concept into Atlas Shrugged which 60 years later is still selling like French Fries at McDonald’s. It was in these two books that the Übermensch found the right philosophic balance and emerged as a new way of thinking. It was this concept which found itself into the Sergio Leone films thus inspiring modern Hollywood in ways that would be inconceivable otherwise. If not for Ayn Rand, her early work as a screenwriter for Cecil B. Deville, her casual associations with Walt Disney, and John Wayne and her deep work in philosophy with the fresh eyes of an immigrant who had seen the worst that communism had to offer—the movie For A Few Dollars More would have never happened, and likely Clint Eastwood would have remained an obscure actor doing bit parts on television shows.