Susan Sontag 1933 – 2004

Susan Sontag was a 20th and early 21st-century American writer, critic, and political activist, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her generation. Her essays, including Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Notes on Camp, brought continental philosophical and aesthetic concerns to a wide American readership. She wrote four novels, several plays, and several volumes of journals published posthumously by her son David Rieff. She campaigned on a wide range of political causes from Vietnam through the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where she directed a production of Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo. Although not an academic philosopher, her cultural criticism shaped the reception of contemporary art, photography, and literature for several decades.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American essayist, novelist, and public intellectual whose philosophical writings shaped American cultural criticism for forty years. Born in New York City, raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, she studied at Berkeley and Chicago and pursued graduate work at Harvard before turning to writing as her vocation.

Sontag's first major essay, Notes on Camp (1964), introduced the analysis of camp as a sensibility and made her famous overnight at thirty-one. Against Interpretation (1966) — the title essay and the collection it gave its name to — argued against the prevailing American practice of treating works of art as encoded messages to be decoded by criticism, defending instead an erotics of art attentive to surface, form, and immediate experience. On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) developed sustained philosophical analyses of how images, illness, and the representation of suffering shape contemporary moral and political life.

Sontag's nonfiction sat between literary criticism and philosophy proper; she resisted the academic disciplinary boundaries that would have classified her as one or the other. Her novels — including The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), which won the National Book Award — reach toward similar concerns from the side of fiction. She died of leukemia in 2004 and remains one of the most influential American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.