The Fountainhead is a great book, one of my favorites. Atlas Shrugged is also a very good book in a slightly different way (but it overstays its welcome). I love Ayn Rand as a writer, she was bold, energetic, smart. She could weave a fictional alternate reality like nobody else, while keeping the human characters at the very center of everything.
The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.
I read "Atlas Shrugged" but I found it to be a frustrating read, mostly because of how simplistic its worldview is. When I read it, I felt like the complex issues it tries to tackle—capitalism, government, individualism—were reduced to black-and-white moral arguments, without much room for nuance or ambiguity.
The characters didn’t help either. They came across as one-dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.
The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.