Valerie Solanas

Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol in 1968. She had a psychology degree from Maryland, had been sexually abused as a child by her father according to her own accounts, had two children taken from her, and was living by panhandling and prostitution in New York when she self-published the manifesto in 1967 and sold mimeographed copies on the street. It argues that men are biologically incomplete females and proposes their elimination, and it is read variously as psychotic literalism, as satire in the tradition of Swift, and as a genuinely original piece of prose; Solanas herself gave different answers about how seriously it was meant. She had given Warhol the script of a play, Up Your Ass, which he lost, and had come to believe he was conspiring with the publisher Maurice Girodias to steal her work. On 3 June 1968 she went to the Factory and shot Warhol three times, wounding the art critic Mario Amaya as well; Warhol was declared clinically dead and revived, and wore a surgical corset for the remaining nineteen years of his life. She turned herself in to a traffic officer that evening. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she pleaded guilty to reckless assault and served three years. Robert Kennedy was killed two days after the shooting, which removed it from the front pages almost immediately. Ti-Grace Atkinson and a few others in the women's movement defended her, which divided that movement sharply. She died of pneumonia in a San Francisco welfare hotel at fifty-two, and her play was performed for the first time in 2000.

• Lived: 1936 CE – 1988 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: writer