Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was one of the most influential American intellectuals of the 20th century—an essayist, novelist, filmmaker, playwright, philosopher, and fierce political activist.
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City to Jewish parents of Lithuanian and Polish descent, she lost her father to tuberculosis when she was five. Her mother remarried, and Susan took her stepfather's surname. A precocious child who learned to read at three and graduated high school at 15, she attended the University of California, Berkeley briefly before transferring to the University of Chicago (B.A. 1951). She earned master's degrees in English and philosophy from Harvard and studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne.
At 17, she married sociologist Philip Rieff (they divorced in 1958); their son, David Rieff, later became a writer and edited her journals. Sontag taught at various institutions in the 1960s but soon devoted herself fully to writing and public life.
Key Works and Ideas
She rose to prominence with the 1964 essay "Notes on Camp'", celebrating ironic, exaggerated aesthetic sensibility, followed by her first collection Against Interpretation (1966), which argued for sensory, erotic engagement with art over heavy-handed analysis.
Her most enduring books include:
- On Photography (1977) — a seminal critique of how photographs shape perception, commodify experience, and distance us from reality ("To photograph people is to violate them...").
- Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) — examining how society uses illness (cancer, AIDS) as metaphor, often stigmatizing sufferers.
- Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) — reflecting on war imagery and empathy.
- Novels like The Volcano Lover (1992) and National Book Award-winning in America (2000).
She also directed films (e.g., Promised Lands, 1974) and plays, staged Beckett in besieged Sarajevo (1993), and wrote short stories (I, etcetera, 1978).
Public Life and Legacy
A lifelong leftist and human-rights advocate, Sontag opposed the Vietnam War, supported dissidents, and critiqued American foreign policy (famously calling 9/11 an attack "not an act of war" but "a consequence" of U.S. actions, sparking controversy). She served as PEN American Center president and received honors like the Jerusalem Prize (2001) and Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2003).
Diagnosed with cancer multiple times (first in 1975), she died of leukemia in New York at 71. Buried in Paris's Montparnasse Cemetery.
Sontag remains polarizing—admired for her erudition and courage, critiqued for perceived arrogance or contradictions (e.g., her complex relationship with feminism and sexuality). Her diaries (edited by her son) and biographies (notably Benjamin Moser's Pulitzer-winning Sontag: Her Life and Work, 2019) reveal deep insecurities beneath the formidable public persona.
Her writing still shapes debates on images, suffering, aesthetics, and politics today. As she wrote: "The painter constructs, the photographer discloses."