In 1967, author and militant feminist Valerie Solanas gave a copy of her play to Andy Warhol in hopes that he might produce it. Titled “Up Your Ass,” it was the work she thought might save her… might make her a writer. Except that Warhol, who promised to look over the manuscript, then lost it instead - offering the enraged Solanas a $25 role in a different film for her trouble. A year later, she did what any Aries would do; she put on make-up, packed her gun, and went looking for him.
Ruled by the planet of action, passion and war, Aries authors are the first: the fiery babies of the zodiac, the new growth of Spring, the unreliable narrators of all literature. They are as decadent as Kathy Acker and as obsessive as Nella Larsen, as powerful as Maya Angelou and as potential-driven as Samuel R. Delany. They, like Erica Jong or John Fowles, are hot until they are cold.
Their pens, burning with that urgent Aries energy, spread language like seed. The words of Flannery O’Connor and John Fante growing up like weeds between sidewalk slabs while those of Toni Cade Bambara and Octavio Paz swell like the thick roots that crack them - prolific and indiscriminate, angry and optimistic.
Sarah J. Bofenkamp is a reader, writer, and librarian living in Palouse, Washington.
More Notable Aries Authors
Louis L'Amour - March 22, 1908
Billy Collins - March 22, 1941
Ama Ata Aidoo - March 23, 1942
Yoko Tawada - March 23, 1960
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - March 24, 1919
Flannery O’Connor - March 25, 1925
Toni Cade Bambara - March 25, 1939
Edward Bellamy - March 26, 1850
Robert Frost - March 26, 1874
Joseph Campbell - March 26, 1904
Tennessee Williams - March 26, 1911
Gregory Corso - March 26, 1930
Erica Jong - March 26, 1942
Frank O’Hara - March 27, 1926
Dorothea Lasky - March 27, 1978
Maxim Gorky - March 28, 1868
Nelson Algren - March 28, 1909
Mario Vargas Llosa - March 28, 1936
Ada Límon - March 28, 1976
Judith Guest - March 29, 1936
Ernest Cline - March 29, 1972
Octavio Paz - March 31, 1914
John Fowles - March 31, 1926
Judith Rossner - March 31, 1935
Nikolai Gogol - April 1, 1809
Milan Kundera - April 1, 1929
Samuel R. Delany - April 1, 1942
Hans Christian Andersen - April 2, 1805
Emile Zola - April 2, 1840
Washington Irving - April 3, 1783
Ann Lister - April 3, 1791
Marguerite Duras - April 4, 1914
Maya Angelou - April 4, 1928
Booker T. Washington - April 5, 1856
Elena Ferrante - April 5, 1943
Leonora Carrington - April 6, 1917
William Wordsworth - April 7, 1770
John Fante - April 8, 1909
Charles Baudelaire - April 9, 1821
Valerie Solanas - April 9, 1936
Beverly Cleary - April 12, 1916
Jon Krakauer - April 12, 1954
Samuel Beckett - April 13, 1906
Eudora Welty - April 13, 1909
Nella Larsen - April 13, 1891
Seamus Heaney - April 13, 1939
Henry James - April 15, 1843
Tristan Tzara - April 16, 1896
Kingsley Amis - April 16, 1922
Tracy K. Smith - April 16, 1972
Thornton Wilder - April 17, 1897
Cynthia Ozick - April 17, 1928
Nick Hornby - April 17, 1957
Kathy Acker - April 18, 1947
