Susan Sontag

Among the literary stars of the radical 1960s, Susan Sontag (born 1933) produced numerous works evaluating and commenting on contemporary life and literature. Her essays appeared in nearly every major publication beginning in 1962, and her assessment of topics such as "camp," pornography, and the Vietnam war earned her a wide readership, well into the 1990s.

Susan Sontag was born on January 28, 1933, in New York City, the daughter of a travelling salesman and a teacher. She recalled that as a child her ambition was to be a chemist, although she had always spent a great deal of time writing. When the family moved to California, she entered North Hollywood High School, graduating at 15. She then entered the University of California at Berkeley, but soon transferred to the University of Chicago. She received a B.A. in philosophy in 1951, a year after her marriage to Philip Rieff, a sociologist. Their son, David, was born in 1952.

Sontag studied at Harvard, receiving her M.A. from the graduate school there and completing all but her dissertation for a Ph.D. She taught at various schools, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Harvard. In 1957 she was awarded a grant from the American Association of University Women which allowed her to study at the Sorbonne, in Paris. The following year she and Rieff divorced, although they collaborated on Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, published in 1959.

Sontag worked as editor of Commentary and settled in New York City with her son. In 1961 she wrote The Benefactor, a novel in the style of the French récit (a type of narrative). She also began contributing regularly to such publications as the Partisan Review, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books. Observers soon hailed Sontag as a leading voice in contemporary criticism, and in 1964 she won Mademoiselle magazine's merit award.

Her statements on "camp" in the fall 1964 issue of Partisan Review were received with delight as she exploded then-current myths concerning the meaning and content of art. In a collection of essays published in 1966 (Against Interpretation) Sontag said, "The function of criticism should be to show how the work of art is what it is … rather than to show what it means."

Although sometimes accused of "intellectual snobbery," she was generally accepted as the enfant terrible on the New York intellectual scene in the 1960s. She received the George Polk Memorial Award in 1966, along with a Guggenheim fellowship. That same year she was also nominated for a National Book Award for Arts and Letters. In 1967 Sontag was a juror at the Venice Film Festival, and she selected movies for the New York Film Festival. Her own film-making efforts led to Duet for Cannibals (1969); Brother Carl (1971); Promised Lands (1974); and Unguided Tour (1983). In 1976 Sontag received further awards, including the Arts and Letters Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a MacArthur Foundation Fellow from 1990-1995.

Sontag wrote Trip to Hanoi in 1968 in which she explored her reactions to a two-week trip to North Vietnam, and in 1969 she published Styles of Radical Will. The latter discussed, among other things, the value of pornography as a distinct literary form. Another of her fiction works, Death Kit (1967), permitted Sontag to contrast her views on reality and dream, but the book was reviewed in the New York Times as one that "skips, shuffles, and snoozes."

Making her home in New York City, in an apartment that overlooked the Hudson River, Sontag travelled extensively. She spent a number of months each year in Europe, and although she was a sought-after lecturer, she appeared only rarely. Sontag limited her speaking engagements since they were, in her word, often "exploitative."

Sontag published On Photography in 1977 and I, etcetera, a collection of short stories, in 1978. Also in 1978 she brought out Illness as Metaphor, which was prompted in part by her own battles with cancer.

In 1992, Sontag published her first novel in 25 years, The Volcano Lover. During the 1990s, she also published a collection of stories, The Way We Live Now (1991); some essays, Paintings (1995); and a play, Alice in Bed (1993). In 1996, she edited, Homo Poeticus by Danilo Kis, a compilation of essays on social conditions and trends. Also in 1996, Sontag wrote a long commentary for the New York Times Magazine, entitled The Decay of Cinema, which discusses the death of cinephilia—the love of movies as an art form.

Further Reading

For a biography of Susan Sontag, see Liam Kennedy's Premature Postmodern—Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (Manchester, 1995). Sontag's own earlier works were perhaps the best insight into her character. They included: The Benefactor (1963); Death Kit (1967); Against Interpretation (1966); Trip to Hanoi (1968); Styles of Radical Will (1969); and Illness as Metaphor (1978). □

Susan Sontag , 1933–2004, American writer and critic, b. New York City. She grew up in Arizona and California, studied philosophy at the Univ. of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford, absorbed Gallic culture in Paris, and settled (1959) in New York City. Regarded as a brilliant and original thinker and highly visible as one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the second half of the 20th cent., Sontag became known for her vividly written critical essays on avant-garde culture in the 1960s. Most of these were collected in Against Interpretation (1966), in which she popularized the word camp, referring to exaggerated reproductions of the style and emotions of pop culture.

Sontag's essays on radical politics are collected in Styles of Radical Will (1969). She meditated on the nature of photography in On Photography (1977), explored the ways in which disease is demonized in Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), analyzed various modernist writers and filmmakers in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), and reassessed her ideas on photography's relationship to human suffering in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Many of her short nonfiction pieces from the 1980s and 90s were collected in Where the Stress Falls (2001). The late essays and speeches in the posthumous collection At the Same Time (2007) reflect her often less than sanguine views of post-9/11 political life and culture.

Her other works include short stories and such novels as The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), and the best-selling historical fictions The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000). Sontag also wrote and directed four motion pictures, including the chamber drama Duet for Cannibals (1969) and the documentary Promised Lands (1974), directed theatrical productions, and was the author of a play, Alice in Bed (1992).

Bibliography: See her Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 (2008), ed. by D. Rieff, her son; Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995), ed. by L. Poague; memoirs by D. Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008),f and S. Nunez, Sempre Susan (2011); biography by C. E. Rollyson and L. Paddock (2000); studies by S. Sayres (1990), L. Kennedy (1995), C. E. Rollyson (2001), C. Seligman (2004), and B. Ching and J. A. Wagner-Lawlor, ed. (2009).

Sontag, Susan (1933–2004),best known for her essays collected in Against Interpretation (1966), a volume that includes the famous “Notes on Camp” and argues that the proper response to creative works is sensory or emotive, not intellectual; Trip to Hanoi (1968), about her view of North Vietnam during the U.S. war against it; Styles of Radical Will (1969), on different ways of changing consciousness, as through drugs, for aesthetic purposes; On Photography (1977), about the social and cultural roles of photography; Illness as Metaphor (1978), concerning psychological relations to physical ailments; Under the Sign of Saturn (1980); AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988); and Where the Stress Falls (2001). Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) is a study of visual representations of violence. She has also written novels, including The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), and In America (2000, National Book Award). Stories are collected in I, etcetera (1978). A romance novel, The Volcano Lover (1992), is set in Naples and based on historical persons: Emma Hamilton, Sir William Hamilton, and Lord Nelson. She published a closet drama, Alice in Bed, a Play (1993), in which she fuses Alice James, the troubled sister of William and Henry, with Lewis Carroll's Alice. There is a mad tea party scene which includes among others the ghosts of Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller.

Sontag, Susan (1933– ), American cultural critic, essayist, and novelist. Born in New York, she studied in America, at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Settling in New York as a teacher and an essayist for Partisan Review and other journals, she wrote two experimental novels, The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967), and collected her essays in two volumes, Against Interpretation (1966) and Styles of Radical Will (1969), in which she surveys a range of topics, from pornographic writing to avant-garde music. The title essay of the first volume protests against the hunt for ‘meanings’ in art, calling for a sensuous appreciation of its surfaces, and foreshadows many of the emphases of postmodernism. While undergoing treatment for cancer in the 1970s, she wrote two provocative essays, On Photography (1977) and Illness as Metaphor (1978), and collected her short stories as I, Etcetera (1978). Later works include a historical romance about Nelson and the Hamiltons, The Volcano Lover (1992).

Sontag, Susan (1933– ) US writer, critic, and essayist. Sontag is perhaps best-known for her cultural criticism, such as Against Interpretation (1966). She has also written novels and short stories, including The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), and In America (1999). The influence of Roland Barthes and structuralism are particularly evident in her Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Aids and its Metaphors (1986).