Notorious celebrity: Valerie Solanas

If you recall the name Valerie Solanas, it is probably because of her SCUM Manifesto or because she shot artist Andy Warhol.

Solanas had an extremely unhappy childhood and was set adrift by her family when she was only 15, yet she managed to get a college degree, ironically in psychology.

Dropping out of graduate school, she migrated from the University of Maryland to New York's Greenwich Village in 1966. In the following year, she asked Warhol to produce a play she had written. Instead, he lost the manuscript. She lay in wait for him at his studio called The Factory, and when he arrived, she shot him. She then shot Mario Amaya, an art critic, and her gun misfired when she took aim at Warhol's manager.

Warhol was badly but not fatally wounded. Solanas surrendered to police, pled guilty of attempted murder, and was given three years.

Solanas, a feminist of the most extreme sort, wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a general attack on men. The letters SCUM stood for "Society for Cutting Up Men."

Solanas, more to be pitied than despised, died in San Francisco of emphysema in 1988.