I've thought about this before. He's a forgotten romantic school novelist of the romantic school right. I remember Harold Bloom including one of John Galt's works in his Western Canon.
I also thought about Roarks red hair. It reminds me of the biblical story of Esau (the redheads) inheritance being stolen by stealth. And I wondered if that wasn't Rand slipping in the symbolic idea of the world in practice sponging off people and pinching their just deserts. In the Fountainhead it would be the second-handers sponging of the first-handers to oversimplify matters.
