Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt on January 16, 1933, in New York City, the elder of two daughters of Jack Rosenblatt and Mildred Jacobson, who ran a fur trading business with operations in China ^[1]. Her father died of tuberculosis in 1938, when Susan was five. Her mother later married Nathan Sontag, an Army Air Corps captain, and Susan took her stepfather's surname ^[2].

The family moved several times during her childhood, first to Tucson, Arizona, and then to the Los Angeles area, where she attended North Hollywood High School. She was a precocious and restless student who read constantly, and she graduated from high school at fifteen ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Susan Sontag before fame finds a bookish girl in suburban California dreaming of the literary journals of Europe and New York.

After a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, she transferred to the University of Chicago, where the Great Books curriculum suited her appetite for philosophy and literature. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1951, at age eighteen ^[2]. At Chicago she met the sociologist Philip Rieff, then a young instructor; they married in 1950 after a courtship of about ten days, when she was seventeen ^[3].

Sontag pursued graduate work at Harvard University, taking master's degrees in English and philosophy in the mid 1950s, and later studied at Oxford and at the Sorbonne in Paris on fellowship ^[2]. Her son, David Rieff, was born in 1952. She and Philip Rieff divorced in 1958, and the following year she moved with David to New York City, determined to live by writing ^[3].

She taught in the religion department at Columbia University and other schools while writing at night. Her first novel, The Benefactor, appeared in 1963 ^[1]. The decisive breakthrough came in 1964, when Partisan Review published her essay "Notes on 'Camp'," an analysis of a sensibility that prized artifice, exaggeration, and style. The piece made her famous almost overnight and drew attention from Time magazine, an unusual fate for an essay in a small literary quarterly ^[4].

In 1966 she collected her early criticism in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, whose title essay argued that critics should attend to the sensory experience of art rather than hunting for hidden meanings. The book closed with the much quoted call for "an erotics of art" and established her as a central voice of the New York intellectual scene, one willing to take popular culture, European cinema, and the avant-garde equally seriously ^[4].

Any account of Susan Sontag achievements begins with her essays. On Photography (1977), a set of linked meditations first published in The New York Review of Books, examined how camera images shape memory, ethics, and the appetite for spectacle; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1978 ^[5]. Illness as Metaphor (1978), written after her first cancer diagnosis, attacked the punitive myths attached to tuberculosis and cancer, arguing that disease should be treated as disease, not as a judgment on character. She extended the argument in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) ^[1].

Sontag also worked steadily in fiction and film. She wrote and directed four feature films, beginning with Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both made in Sweden, followed by the documentary Promised Lands (1974), filmed in Israel after the Yom Kippur War, and Unguided Tour (1983) ^[2]. Her later novels brought a second wave of acclaim: The Volcano Lover (1992), a historical novel about Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Admiral Nelson, became a bestseller, and In America (2000), about the Polish actress Helena Modjeska, won the National Book Award for fiction ^[5].

Honors accumulated across her career. She was a MacArthur Fellow from 1990 to 1995, served as president of the PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989, and received the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2003 ^[6]. Her final major work, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), returned to the questions of On Photography, asking what images of war actually do to those who view them ^[5].

Sontag never separated writing from public argument. She opposed the Vietnam War early and visited Hanoi in 1968, publishing the essay "Trip to Hanoi" about the journey ^[1]. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium she wrote the notorious line calling the white race "the cancer of human history," a phrase she later said she regretted for insulting cancer patients ^[3].

Her politics shifted over time. At a 1982 rally in New York supporting Poland's Solidarity movement, she angered parts of the left by declaring that communism was fascism with a human face, and that readers of Reader's Digest had sometimes understood Soviet reality better than readers of leftist journals ^[3]. The remark set off a long controversy about her intellectual loyalties.

Her most sustained political act came in the 1990s, when she made repeated trips to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. In 1993, in the besieged city, she directed a candlelit production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot with local actors, an event covered worldwide as a gesture of solidarity ^[6]. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, a short piece she wrote in The New Yorker questioning official rhetoric about the hijackers' cowardice provoked fierce criticism, one more instance of her willingness to say unpopular things in public ^[3].

Among the basic Susan Sontag facts: she married once, to Philip Rieff, and their son David Rieff became a writer and editor who later edited some of her posthumous work ^[3]. She lived much of her adult life in Manhattan, with long stays in Paris, and kept a personal library reported to run to many thousands of volumes.

Sontag had significant relationships with both men and women, including, in her later decades, a long partnership with the photographer Annie Leibovitz, which the two rarely discussed publicly during Sontag's lifetime ^[7]. Her journals, published after her death as Reborn (2008) and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (2012), revealed far more of her private self than her essays ever had ^[7].

Illness marked her later life. Diagnosed with advanced breast cancer in 1975, she underwent aggressive treatment and survived, an experience that fed directly into Illness as Metaphor. A uterine sarcoma followed in 1998, which she also survived ^[1].

Through the 1990s and early 2000s Sontag divided her energy between fiction, essays, and human rights work, lecturing widely and collecting international awards. In America won the National Book Award in 2000, and Regarding the Pain of Others appeared in 2003 to strong reviews ^[5].

In early 2004 she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder that progressed to acute myelogenous leukemia. She underwent a bone marrow transplant in Seattle, but the treatment failed. Susan Sontag died on December 28, 2004, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, at age 71 ^[8]. She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, near writers she had long admired ^[2].

Her son David Rieff later described her final illness and her refusal to accept death in his memoir Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), a book that added a painful coda to any Susan Sontag biography ^[7].

Two decades after her death, Sontag's essays remain in print and on syllabi across literature, film, and media studies. On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others are still cited in debates about war imagery and social media, and Illness as Metaphor continues to shape how doctors and patients talk about disease ^[5].

Her archive, including manuscripts, journals, and her personal library, was acquired by the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002 ^[1]. Interest in her life has stayed high: Benjamin Moser's authorized biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2020 ^[7].

Sontag divides opinion as sharply now as she did while alive. Admirers see the model of the engaged public intellectual, a writer who treated seriousness as a moral duty. Critics point to her contradictions and reversals. Both camps keep reading her, which is the outcome she would probably have chosen ^[6].