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Susan Lee Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and critic. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), the short story "The Way We Live Now" (1986) and the novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999).
Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or traveling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about literature, cinema, photography and media, illness, war, human rights, and left-wing politics. Her essays and speeches drew backlash and controversy, and she has been called "one of the most influential critics of her generation". "Susan Sontag", The New York Review of Books, accessed December 19, 2012
Remembering an unhappy childhood, with a cold, alcoholic, distant mother who was "always away", Sontag lived on Long Island, New York, then in Tucson, Arizona, and later in the San Fernando Valley in southern California, where she took refuge in books and graduated from North Hollywood High School at the age of 15. She began her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley but transferred to the University of Chicago in admiration of its prominent core curriculum. At Chicago, she undertook studies in philosophy, ancient history, and literature alongside her other requirements. Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Christian Mackauer, Richard McKeon, Peter von Blanckenhagen, and Kenneth Burke were among her lecturers. She graduated at age 18 with an A.B. and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa."A Gluttonous Reader", Interview with M. McQuade in Poague, pp. 271–278. While at Chicago, she became best friends with fellow student Mike Nichols. In 1951, her work appeared in print for the first time in the winter issue of the Chicago Review.
At 17, Sontag married writer Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a 10-day courtship; their marriage lasted eight years.Sontag, Susan. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, ed. D. Rieff, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 144. While studying at Chicago, Sontag attended a summer school taught by the sociologist who became a friend and subsequently influenced her study of German thinkers. Upon completing her Chicago degree, Sontag taught freshman English at the University of Connecticut for the 1952–53 academic year. She attended Harvard University for graduate school, initially studying literature with Perry Miller and Harry Levin before moving into philosophy and theology under Paul Tillich, Jacob Taubes, Raphael Demos, and Morton White.See Susan Sontag, 'Literature is Freedom' in At the Same Time, ed. P. Dilonardo and A. Jump, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p.206 and Morton White, A Philosopher's Story, Pennsylvania University Press, 1999, p. 148. See also Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 39–40 and Daniel Horowitz "Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World", University of Pennsylvania, 2012, p. 314.
After completing her Master of Arts in philosophy, Sontag began doctoral research in metaphysics, ethics, Greek philosophy, Continental philosophy, and theology at Harvard. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rieff for a year while working on his 1955 book Eros and Civilization.Rollyson and Paddock. Sontag researched for Rieff's 1959 study before their divorce in 1958, and contributed to the book to such an extent that she has been considered an unofficial co-author. The couple had a son, David Rieff, who went on to be his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a writer in his own right. According to Sontag's Benjamin Moser, Sontag was the true author of the text on Freud, which she wrote after David's birth, and in the separation the latter was the subject of an exchange: she handed over the authorship of the book to Rieff, he gave her their son.
Sontag was awarded an American Association of University Women's fellowship for the 1957–58 academic year to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she traveled without her husband and son.Sante, Luc. "Sontag: The Precocious Years", Sunday Book Review, The New York Times, January 29, 2009, accessed December 19, 2012 There, she had classes with Iris Murdoch, Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer, and H. L. A. Hart while also attending the B. Phil seminars of J. L. Austin and the lectures of Isaiah Berlin. But Oxford did not appeal to her, and she transferred after Michaelmas term of 1957 to the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).See Morton White, A Philosopher's Story, Pennsylvania University Press, 1999, p.148; and Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 43–45 In Paris, Sontag socialized with expatriate artists and academics including Allan Bloom, Jean Wahl, Alfred Chester, Harriet Sohmers, and María Irene Fornés.Field, Edward. The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, Wisconsin, 2005, pp. 158–170; Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 45–50; and Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, ed. D. Rieff, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, pp. 188–189. She remarked that her time in Paris was perhaps the most important period of her life. It certainly provided the basis of her long intellectual and artistic association with the culture of France."An Emigrant of Thought", interview with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, in Poague, pp. 143–164 She moved to New York in 1959 to live with Fornés for the next seven years, regaining custody of her son and teaching at several universities, including the City College of New York, while her literary reputation grew.
At age 30, Sontag published an experimental novel called The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on November 24, 1986, in The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a significant text on the AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist with The Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel, In America (2000). The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice:
She wrote and directed four films and also wrote several plays, the most successful of which were Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea.
The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. (p. 10)
Sontag writes that the convenience of modern photography has created an overabundance of visual material, and "just about everything has been photographed".Sontag, Susan, "On Photography", 1977 This has altered our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view, or should view.
"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe" and has changed our "viewing ethics".
Sontag continued to theorize about the role of photography in life in her essay "Looking at War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death", which appeared in the December 9, 2002, issue of The New Yorker. There she concludes that the problem of our reliance on images and especially photographic images is not that "people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs ... that the photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture" (p. 94).
She became a role model for many feminists and aspiring female writers during the 1960s and 1970s.
According to journalist Mark M. Goldblatt, Sontag later made a "sarcastic retraction, saying the line slanders cancer patients". Patrick J. Buchanan said: "Rewrite that sentence with 'Jewish race' in place of 'white race' and the passage would fit nicely into Mein Kampf".Buchanan Patrick J. (2001). , (New York: St. Matrin'
In a 2007 letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, John Lavagnino identified an unattributed citation from Roland Barthes's 1970 essay "S/Z" in Sontag's 2004 speech "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning", delivered as the Nadine Gordimer Lecture in March 2004. Further research led Lavagnino to identify several passages that appeared to have been taken without attribution from an essay on hypertext fiction by Laura Miller published in the New York Times Book Review six years earlier . Writing for the Observer, Michael Calderone interviewed Sontag's publisher, who said, "This was a speech, not a formal essay", and that "Susan herself never prepared it for publication".
Sontag's speech reportedly "drew boos and shouts from the audience". The Nation published her speech, excluding the passage contrasting the magazine with Reader's Digest. Responses to her statement were varied. Some said that Sontag's sentiments had been held by many on the left for years, while others accused her of betraying "radical ideas".
In "Sontag, Bloody Sontag", an essay in her 1994 book Vamps & Tramps, critic Camille Paglia describes her initial admiration of and subsequent disillusionment with Sontag. She makes several criticisms, including Harold Bloom's comment "Mere Sontagisme!" on Paglia's doctoral dissertation, and says that Sontag "had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing". Paglia also recounts a visit by Sontag to Bennington College, in which she arrived hours late and ignored the agreed-upon topic of the event.
In his book Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb criticizes Sontag and other people with extravagant lifestyles who nevertheless declare themselves "against the market system". Taleb assesses Sontag's shared New York mansion at $28 million, and writes that "it is immoral to be in opposition to the market system and not live (somewhere in Vermont or Northwestern Afghanistan) in a hut or cave isolated from it" and that it is even worse to "claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences".
During 1989 Sontag was the President of PEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of the International PEN writers' organization. After Iranian leader Khomeini issued a fatwa death sentence against writer Salman Rushdie for blasphemy after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses that year, Sontag's uncompromising support of Rushdie was crucial in rallying American writers to his cause.Hitchens, Christopher. "Assassins of the Mind", Vanity Fair, February 2009, accessed December 18, 2012
A few years later, during the Siege of Sarajevo, Sontag gained attention for directing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a candlelit theater in the Bosnian capital, cut off from its electricity supply for three and a half years. The reaction of Sarajevo's besieged residents was noted:
Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia. She is buried in Paris at Cimetière du Montparnasse.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 44249). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition. Her final illness has been chronicled by her son, David Rieff.
Sontag lived with 'H', the writer and model Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, whom she first met at U. C. Berkeley from 1958 to 1959. Later, Sontag was the partner of María Irene Fornés, a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director. Upon splitting with Fornés, she was involved with an Italian aristocrat, Carlotta Del Pezzo, and the German academic Eva Kollisch.See Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, p.262, 269. Sontag was romantically involved with the American artists Jasper Johns and Paul Thek.Paul Thek Artist's Artist ed. H. Falckenberg. During the early 1970s, she lived with Nicole Stéphane, a Rothschild banking heiress turned movie actress,Leo Lerman, "The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman", NY: Knopf, 2007, page 413 and, later, the choreographer Lucinda Childs. Sontag also had a relationship with the writer Joseph Brodsky, who deepened her appreciation of the anti-communism of the writers persecuted by the Soviet regime, whom she had read and in some cases even known, without really understanding them.See Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, p. 31.
With photographer Annie Leibovitz, Sontag maintained a close romantic relationship stretching from the later 1980s until her final years.McGuigan, Cathleen. "Through Her Lens", Newsweek, October 2, 2006 Sontag and Leibovitz met in 1989, when both had already established notability in their careers. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work. During Sontag's lifetime, neither woman publicly disclosed whether the relationship was a friendship or romantic. Newsweek in 2006 made reference to Leibovitz's decade-plus relationship with Sontag: "The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's."
When interviewed for her 2006 book A Photographer's Life: 1990–2005, Leibovitz said the book told a number of stories, and that "with Susan, it was a love story." While The New York Times in 2009 referred to Sontag as Leibovitz's "companion", Leibovitz wrote in A Photographer's Life, "Words like 'companion' and 'partner' were not in our vocabulary. We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still 'friend. The same year, Leibovitz said the descriptor "lover" was accurate. She later reiterated, "Call us 'lovers.' I like 'lovers.' You know, 'lovers' sounds romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love Susan."
In an interview in The Guardian in 2000, Sontag was open about bisexuality:
Many of Sontag's obituaries failed to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably that with Leibovitz. Daniel Okrent, public editor of The New York Times, defended the newspaper's obituary, saying that at the time of Sontag's death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so). After Sontag's death, Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made clear references to her relationship with Sontag.
Sontag was quoted by editor-in-chief Brendan Lemon of Out Magazine magazine as saying "I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the 'open secret.' I'm used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven't repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up."
Of Against Interpretation, Brandon Robshaw of The Independent later wrote that "Sontag was remarkably prescient; her project of analysing popular culture as well as high culture, the Doors as well as Dostoevsky, is now common practice throughout the educated world." In Critique and Postcritique (2017), Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker argue that the title essay from the aforementioned collection played an important role in the field of postcritique, a movement within literary criticism and cultural studies that attempts to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism.
Reviewing Sontag's On Photography in 1998, Michael Starenko wrote that it "has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag's claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical 'tool kit' that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads."
A documentary about Sontag directed by Nancy Kates, Regarding Susan Sontag, was released in 2014. It received the Special Jury Mention for Best Documentary Feature at the 2014 Tribeca Festival.
In February 2023, Screen reported that Brouhaha Entertainment was producing a biographical film directed by Kirsten Johnson and featuring Kristen Stewart as Sontag. It is based on Benjamin Moser's biography .
/ref> According to Eliot Weinberger, "She came to regret that last phrase, and wrote a whole book against the use of illness as metaphor". But, he wrote, this did not lead to any "public curiosity about those who are not cancerously white", and "She may well have been the last unashamed Eurocentrist".
Allegations of plagiarism
Ellen Lee accused Sontag of plagiarism after discovering at least 12 passages in In America that were similar to or copied from passages in four other books about Helena Modjeska without attribution.Marsh B. (2007) Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education, SUNY Press. Sontag said of the passages, "All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain. I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them. There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions."Carvajal, Doreen. (May 27, 2002) "So Whose Words Are They? Susan Sontag Creates a Stir." New York Times Book Review.
On Communism
At a New York pro-Solidarity rally in 1982, Sontag said that "people on the left", like herself, "have willingly or unwillingly told a lot of lies". She added that they:
On the September 11 attacks
Sontag was angrily criticized for what she wrote in the September 24, 2001, issue of The New Yorker about the immediate aftermath of 9/11. "Novelist, Radical Susan Sontag, 71, Dies in New York", The Washington Times, December 29, 2004, accessed December 19, 2012 She called the attacks a "monstrous dose of reality" and criticized U.S. public officials and media commentators for trying to convince the American public that "everything is O.K." Specifically, she opposed the idea that the perpetrators were "cowards", a comment George W. Bush had made. Rather, she argued the country should see the terrorists' actions not as "a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."
Criticism from other writers
In a 2000 article for Harper's Magazine's that was later included in his book Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe called Sontag "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review."
Activism
Sontag became politically active in the 1960s, opposing the Vietnam War.Rollyson and Paddock. In January 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay a proposed 10% Vietnam War surtax."Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post. In May 1968, she visited Hanoi; afterward, she wrote favorably about North Vietnamese society in her essay Trip to Hanoi.Rollyson and Paddock.
To the people of Sarajevo, Ms. Sontag has become a symbol, interviewed frequently by the local newspapers and television, invited to speak at gatherings everywhere, asked for autographs on the street. After the opening performance of the play, the city's Mayor, Muhamed Kreševljaković, came onstage to declare her an honorary citizen, the only foreigner other than the recently departed United Nations commander, Lieut. Gen. Phillippe Morillon, to be so named. "It is for your bravery, in coming here, living here, and working with us," he said.
Personal life
Sontag's mother died of lung cancer in Hawaii in 1986.
Sexuality and relationships
Sontag became aware of her bisexuality during her early teens. At 15, she wrote in her diary, "I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this)." At 16, she had a sexual encounter with a woman: "Perhaps I was drunk, after all, because it was so beautiful when H began making love to me... It had been 4:00 before we had gotten to bed... I became fully conscious that I desired her, she knew it, too." Susan Sontag: 'It was so beautiful when H began making love to me', Paul Bignell, The Independent on Sunday, November 16, 2008 Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947–1964, Penguin, January 2009
Legacy
Following Sontag's death, Steve Wasserman of the Los Angeles Times called her "one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights." Eric Homberger of The Guardian called Sontag "the 'Dark Lady' of American cultural life for over four decades." He observed that "despite a brimming and tartly phrased political sensibility, she was fundamentally an aesthete who offered a reorientation of American cultural horizons."
Awards and honors
Works
Fiction
Plays
Nonfiction
Collections of essays
Sontag published numerous essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The New Republic, Art in America, Granta and the London Review of Books. Many of these were included in her collections.
Monographs
Films
Discography
Other works
Digital archive
A digital archive of 17,198 of Sontag's emails is kept by the UCLA Department of Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library. Her archive—and the efforts to make it publicly available while protecting it from data rot—are the subject of the article On Excess: Susan Sontag's Born-Digital Archive, by Jeremy Schmidt and Jacquelyn Ardam.
Biographical play, documentary, and biopic film
Sontag: Reborn is a play dramatizing Sontag's life as recorded in her early journals (which were later edited and published as the book Reborn). Described as "a spellbinding X-ray of a writer’s psyche", Sontag: Reborn traces Sontag's private life from age 14 to her emergence as a renowned author and activist. The young Sontag wrestles with her emerging sexuality and precocious intelligence. The refuge of her diary became integral to her development as a writer. The play was adapted from Sontag's journals by theatre artist Moe Angelos, who also plays Sontag in the production, directed by Marianne Weems, and produced by The Builders Association. Sontag: Reborn was first staged at the Under the Radar Festival in 2012, moved to off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in 2013, and was staged into 2014.
See also
Notes
Additional general references, not in-line
Further reading
External links
Categories: Official Website, 1933 Births, 2004 Deaths, 20th-century American Jews, 20th-century American Essayists, 20th-century American Historians, 20th-century American Novelists, 20th-century American Women Novelists, 21st-century American Jews, 21st-century American Essayists, 21st-century American Historians, 21st-century American Non-fiction Writers, 21st-century American Novelists, 21st-century American Women Novelists, Alumni Of St Anne's College, Oxford, American Lgbtq Novelists, American Anti-communists, American Anti–vietnam War Activists, American Atheists, American Bisexual Writers, American Expatriates In France, American Feminist Writers, American Historical Novelists, American People Of Lithuanian-jewish Descent, American People Of Polish-jewish Descent, American Women Critics, American Women Essayists, American Women Film Critics, American Women Historians, American Women Historical Novelists, American Women Literary Critics, American Literary Critics, American Women Non-fiction Writers, Bisexual Jews, Bisexual Academics, Bisexual Feminists, Bisexual Women Writers, Burials At Montparnasse Cemetery, Continental Philosophers, Deaths From Leukemia In New York, Deaths From Myelodysplastic Syndrome, Harvard University Alumni, Historians From New York, Jerusalem Prize Recipients, Jewish American Academics, Jewish American Atheists, Jewish American Feminists, Jewish American Historians, Jewish American Non-fiction Writers, Jewish American Novelists, Jewish Lgbtq Women, Jewish Anti-communists, Jewish Philosophers, Jewish Women Writers, Lgbtq Media Critics, Lgbtq People From Arizona, Lgbtq People From New York, Lgbtq Philosophers, Liberalism In The United States, Macarthur Fellows, Members Of The American Academy Of Arts And Letters, National Book Award Winners, National Book Critics Circle Award Winners, North Hollywood High School Alumni, Novelists From Arizona, Novelists From New York, Photography Critics, Sarah Lawrence College Faculty, University Of California, Berkeley Alumni, University Of Chicago Alumni, University Of Paris Alumni, Writers From New York City, Writers From Tucson, Arizona
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