Producing a work of art, as Richard Halley tells Dagny in Atlas Shrugged, requires "a labor which makes a chain gang look like a rest and a severity no army-drilling sadist could impose." The hand-edited drafts of Ayn Rand's novels, preserved in the Library of Congress, show a literary genius laboring on her masterpieces––through selection, clarification, integration, and the substitution of implicit for explicit statements. These two lectures take a fascinating look at the development that certain scenes inThe Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged went through-in particular, scenes involving philosophical speeches and romantic encounters.