I've read pretty much everything Rand wrote, fiction and nonfiction. Most of this for the first time in college, or just afterward.

If you listen to Rand, she would tell you her philosophy was formed solidly and consistently in her early years, and never changed. In reality, she's human like everyone else, and her thinking evolved in some ways and degraded in some ways over the years. But none of that changes the ideas themselves.

In her fiction, John Galt and a couple of others had this intrinsic philosophical consistency, intellectually complete from the beginning of the book. John Galt is the same person leaving the novel as he is going in, an archetype of philosophical perfection.

However, the most interesting characters in her fiction are those who don't know the answers, in either the real world or the realm of philosophy, and struggle through the book to figure them out. Even Howard Roark falls into this category. Like Galt, his ideology is consistent and strong, but unlike Galt, he has to learn the WHY of what he believes. I think Rand was the same, with a "sense of life" that started with her earliest writings, but as she wrote she developed this into a rational philosophy.

In later years, a sort of Rand "cult" developed in New York and elsewhere, which if you think about it, might be the most bizarre oxymoronic concept in history.