SONTAG, Susan

(b. 16 January 1933 in New York City), critic, essayist, novelist, and radical New York intellectual who emerged during the 1960s as a provocative commentator on avant-garde art, popular culture, and leftist politics.

Born Susan Lee Rosenblatt, Sontag was the eldest of two daughters of Jack Rosenblatt and Mildred Jacobson, both descendants of European Jewish immigrants. Sontag was born in a Manhattan hospital but spent her early childhood in China, where her father headed a fur-trading business until his death from tuberculosis when Sontag was five. Shortly thereafter, Sontag began experiencing bouts of asthma, prompting her mother to move the family from their American residence in New York to Miami. When the Florida climate failed to improve Sontag's condition, her mother relocated to Tucson, Arizona, in 1939. There Sontag, already recognizably precocious and serious-minded, began elementary school in the third grade.

Sontag has described her childhood as a period of "imprisonment" during which her advanced intellectual development and, later, her disdain for postwar conformist culture chafed against the mediocrity and superficiality of her peers. The early loss of her father and ambivalent relationship with her mother, a vain and distant woman prone to melancholia and alcoholism, further heightened Sontag's sense of isolation. Turning to books for solace and much needed stimulation, Sontag became a voracious reader, adopting as her first literary heroes the adventure writer Richard Halliburton and Edgar Allan Poe.

Sontag's mother married Nathan Sontag, a convalescing Air Force pilot and decorated war hero, in 1945, and the next year the family moved to Southern California. There, Sontag devoted herself to reading nineteenth-century European classics, the avant-garde fiction of the French writer André Gide, and Partisan Review, then the leading intellectual journal of the American Left, which she discovered at age thirteen and to which she dreamed of one day being a contributor. While in high school, Sontag and a friend managed to arrange a visit with the German novelist Thomas Mann at his California home, a formative, if somewhat demystifying, experience that shaped her conception of the literary life. In January 1949 Sontag graduated early from North Hollywood High School and, to placate her mother, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, for the spring semester.

In the fall of 1949 she transferred to the University of Chicago, her first choice, where she completed the rigorous undergraduate curriculum in two years, graduating in 1951. While at Chicago, Sontag met David Rieff, a sociology instructor and doctoral candidate, whom she married in December 1950 after a mere ten-day courtship. Sontag was seventeen and Rieff twenty-eight. She gave birth to their son, David, on 28 September 1952. During their eight-year marriage, Sontag collaborated with Rieff on his book Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1959), although she did not receive credit as coauthor.

In 1953 Sontag began a graduate English program at the University of Connecticut but left the next year for Harvard University, where she completed a master's degree in philosophy in 1957. With a recommendation from the philosopher Paul Tillich, Sontag received a fellowship to study at Oxford University in England the next academic year. Leaving her husband and son behind, she traveled alone to Europe. Dissatisfied with the dominance of A. J. Ayer's analytical philosophy at Oxford, however, in 1958 Sontag moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne with the intention of completing her dissertation; she never did. In Paris, Sontag befriended the American writer Alfred Chester and his circle and immersed herself in the French intellectual milieu, then under the spell of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism.

Returning to the United States at the end of 1958, Sontag requested a divorce from Rieff. She had come to regard her husband as overly conventional and regretted having married him at such an early age. She collected her six-year-old son and moved to New York to support herself as a writer, even refusing alimony from Rieff. Sontag worked briefly as an editorial assistant for Commentary and taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and City College during 1959 and 1960 before securing a position in the religion department at Columbia University beginning in 1960. During this time, Sontag became romantically involved with the playwright María Irene Fornés. Though Sontag has remained silent about her sexuality, her long-time relationship with the photographer Annie Liebovitz, initiated in the late 1970s, reduced the matter to an open secret.

In 1963 Sontag published her first novel, The Benefactor, which she dedicated to Fornés. Sontag's challenging book, influenced by the French nouveau roman, was championed by the renowned editor Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus (subsequently Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) and received mixed but respectful reviews. Through Giroux and his publishing partner, Roger Straus, Sontag gained entrée to the upper circles of the New York literati and made an immediate impression. The allure of Sontag's superior mind and statuesque beauty, featured in striking photographs that graced the jackets of her books, proved irresistible to many, while inciting the envy of others.

In 1962 Sontag realized her aspiration of writing for Partisan Review with a published review of the Polish-born writer Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave. Over the next two years Sontag wrote additional critical pieces for Partisan Review, Evergreen Review, the Nation, and the newly established New York Review of Books, together forming the core of her highly regarded first collection, Against Interpretation (1966). Among these was "Notes on Camp," published in the autumn 1964 issue of Partisan Review, in which Sontag attempted to distill the essential characteristics of "camp" sensibility in both highbrow and popular artistic forms.

Camp, Sontag noted, is predominantly found in the performing and decorative arts, and its hallmarks are unabashed extravagance, sentimentality, theatricality, self-parody, and the primacy of style over content. In contrast to kitsch or art that is merely bad, Sontag argued that the flamboyance and corniness of camp—displayed, for example, by opera, art nouveau, the British writer Oscar Wilde's dandyism, and such film stars as Greta Garbo—can result in an awfulness that is genuinely admirable. This essay in particular—along with writings on such Continental luminaries as Albert Camus, György Lukács, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Eugène Ionesco, Nathalie Sarraute, and Jean-Luc Godard—attracted notice in the mainstream press, leading to a Time magazine feature and widening interest in Sontag's dynamic intelligence and self-styled aesthetic principles. In other essays, notably "Against Interpretation" and "On Style," Sontag delineated her corrective view of criticism as an act of passion and sensuous appreciation rather than a "philistine" obsession with deciphering the content of a work.

While establishing herself as a talented literary polemicist, Sontag began work on a second novel, Death Kit (1967). Like The Benefactor, Death Kit is a novel of ideas, fashioned after experimental French forms, that explores the paradoxical nature of dream, reality, and perception. Although the fanfare surrounding its publication enhanced Sontag's fame, the book was poorly received and invited a backlash against the author's celebrity, including charges of pretentiousness, aesthetic detachment, and hypocritical self-promotion. All these criticisms would become the staples of Sontag's detractors and the subject of various literary feuds throughout her career.

In 1967 Sontag's political consciousness, dormant since adolescence, was reawakened by escalating American military action in Vietnam. In January 1968 Sontag was arrested, along with the writers Allen Ginsberg and Grace Paley, during an antiwar demonstration in New York. In May of that year Sontag accepted an invitation from the Communist government of North Vietnam to visit Hanoi. Sontag recorded her cultural disorientation and observations of the North Vietnamese people, whose foreign demeanor and morality she naively struggled to understand, in "Trip to Hanoi." Sontag's self-described "neo-radicalism," conveyed in spirited Marxist declamations of American-style capitalist imperialism, also extended to commentaries on Cuba during the late 1960s, leading to a visit to that country in December 1968 and support for Castro's Communist revolution. More than a decade later, however, after these regimes proved repressive rather than democratic, Sontag reversed her position. In a notorious speech, given at Manhattan's Town Hall in February 1982, she condemned Communist tyranny and denounced Communism itself as "fascism with a friendly face." The speech and Sontag's apostasy were sharply criticized by members of the American Left.

By the late 1960s Sontag was an international star. She traveled to Sweden in the spring of 1968 to begin work on her first feature film, Duet for Cannibals, which premiered in 1969. Though the film was well received at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, Sontag's subsequent work as filmmaker failed to live up to its promise. Like her fiction, it was relegated to the periphery of her creative endeavors, vastly overshadowed by the acclaim of her critical proclamations and the inseparable mystique of her celebrity persona.

Sontag's second essay collection, Styles of Radical Will (1969), included "Trip to Hanoi" and essays previously printed in Partisan Review and other journals. Among these are two landmark essays: "Aesthetics of Silence," a philosophical argument for silence as a valid mode of resistance and transcendence in modern art, and "The Pornographic Imagination," a defense of literary pornography as a radical art form, exemplified by The Story of O and certain erotic works by Georges Bataille. The volume also contains "What's Happening in America (1966)," Sontag's dire diagnosis of contemporary American politics and culture, and masterly critiques of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and of Godard that reveal Sontag's sophisticated understanding of cinema.

Hailed during the 1960s as a model of the new, independent woman—glamorous, wildly brilliant, outspoken, and, above all, self-defined—Sontag established herself as an audacious and prescient authority on matters of culture and style. Her high-profile appearances in glossy women's magazines and her willingness to treat belittled subjects of popular art with serious critical attention leveled distinctions between high and low culture, encouraging others to do the same and adumbrating the omnivorous approach of cultural studies in the coming postmodern age. Likewise, her affinity for postwar Continental literature, which she showcased in much of her writing, precipitated, if not directly influenced, the influx of French literary philosophy into the American academy during the 1970s and 1980s.

Over the next several decades Sontag remained a preeminent woman of letters, renowned for her verve, intellectual commitment, and complex, often self-contradictory engagement with controversial issues of the day. She continued to produce important collections of critical essays, including On Photography (1977); Illness as Metaphor (1978), inspired by her near-death experience with breast cancer in the mid-1970s; and AIDS as Metaphor (1989). Her novel, In America (2000), received the National Book Award.

Sontag's semi-autobiographic stories in I, etcetera (1978) offer insight into her formative experiences. Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995), edited by Leland Poague, contains interviews with Sontag dating from 1969 through 1993. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (2000), by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, is a highly informative biography that does much to counter Sontag's reticence on personal matters. Critical studies include Sohnya Sayres, Susan Sontag: Elegiac Modernist (1990); Kennedy Liam, Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995); and Carl Rollyson, Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work (2001).

Josh Lauer