CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud

"authorial intent" only really matters insofar as one wants to determine the author's intent to aid in interpretation. However, the author's intent and the literal text can also be completely different things. Bad writers have this problem all the time because they are either not literate enough to communicate what they mean, or they're too stupid to convey their own thoughts.
I bring it up because a lot of people have a habit of attributing meaning to works that are fairly literal.
Tolkien commented on this with the fact that if he actually wrote LOTR as an allegory for WW2, Sauron and Saruman would have won with the latter making his own Ring and dividing the world between them.