SONTAG, SUSAN

born Jan. 16, 1933, New York, N.Y., U.S. American intellectual and writer best known for her essays on modern culture. Sontag was reared in Tucson, Arizona, and in Los Angeles. She attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year and then transferred to the University of Chicago, from which she graduated in 1951. She studied English literature (M.A., 1954) and philosophy (M.A., 1955) at Harvard University and taught philosophy at several colleges and universities before the publication of her first novel, The Benefactor (1963). During the early 1960s she also wrote a number of essays and reviews, most of which were published in such periodicals as The New York Review of Books, Commentary, and Partisan Review. Some of these short pieces were collected in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1968). Her second novel, Death Kit (1967), was followed by another collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will (1969). Her later critical works included On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1979), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988). Her novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance was published in 1992. Sontag's essays are characterized by a serious philosophical approach to various aspects and personalities of modern culture. She first came to national attention in 1964 with an essay entitled Notes on Camp', in which she discussed the attributes of taste within a particular segment of society. She also wrote on such subjects as theatre and film and such figures as writer Nathalie Sarraute, director Robert Bresson, and painter Francis Bacon. In addition to criticism and fiction, she has written screenplays and edited selected writings of Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud. Additional reading Studies of Sontag's life and work include Sohnya Sayres, Susan Sontag: The Elegaic Modernist (1990); and Liam Kennedy, Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995).