Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (1933-2004), American writer, known for her philosophical writings on modern culture. Born in New York City, Sontag studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a B.A. degree from the University of Chicago. She later undertook graduate study in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard and Oxford universities.

Sontag’s 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp’,” published in the quarterly Partisan Review, brought her national attention. Her new definition of “camp” as the “love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration” was widely discussed and reported in news magazines.

During the 1960s and 1970s Sontag’s essays and observations had a strong influence on the American counterculture. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Later, as Yugoslavia was breaking apart in the 1990s, she spoke out in favor of international intervention. Sontag’s involvement with contemporary issues was not limited to her writing. From 1993 to 1996, she spent time in Sarajevo, offering her services to a city under siege in Yugoslavia’s civil war. As president of the American chapter of the writer’s society PEN from 1987 to 1989, she campaigned for human rights. Later she criticized United States foreign policy in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Sontag wrote on a variety of subjects, from aesthetics to illness. Following a battle with cancer in the 1970s, she wrote the book Illness as Metaphor (1978). In the book she noted the use of such phrases as “a cancer on the presidency,” which demonized the disease. She also condemned the tendency to make those who are ill feel responsible for their illness. Her other nonfiction works include On Photography (1977), AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Her essay collections include Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), and Where the Stress Falls (2001). Sontag also wrote the novels The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (2000), and published a collection of short stories, I, etcetera (1978). In America, a story about a Polish actress who moves to California in the late 19th century, won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction.