Susan Sontag

She finished high school at 15 and her University of Chicago degree at 18, and in between, at 17, she married her instructor after a courtship of 10 days. Susan Rosenblatt was born in New York City to a fur trader who died of tuberculosis in Tientsin when she was five and a mother she remembered as cold, alcoholic and always away. The family moved to Tucson, then to the San Fernando Valley, where she read her way out. Philip Rieff taught sociology. Their son David arrived when she was 19. She took a philosophy master's at Harvard, divorced in 1958, and moved to New York, where within a few years she quit teaching entirely.

The essays made her famous fast. "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) put a gay sensibility of deliberate artifice in front of a general readership. "Against Interpretation" (1966) argued that the hunt for a work's hidden meaning destroys the experience of it: in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. On Photography (1977) argued that photographs anesthetize, and made Diane Arbus its chief exhibit. Illness as Metaphor (1978) attacked the moralizing language wrapped around disease — the notion that cancer is what repression does to the body. She was being treated for breast cancer as she wrote it.

She was formidable, and she changed her mind in public, which is rarer. In 1967 she wrote in Partisan Review that the white race is the cancer of human history, a line she later retracted, saying it slandered cancer patients. At a pro-Solidarity rally in February 1982 she told an audience that communism was fascism with a human face, and that a reader of Reader's Digest had understood the Soviet bloc better than a reader of The Nation. The room booed. Some on the left accused her of betraying radical ideas. Her New Yorker piece of September 24, 2001 refused to call the hijackers cowards and located the attacks in specific American alliances and actions, and the response was ferocious. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) she reopened On Photography and took back part of it.

She died in New York on December 28, 2004, of acute myelogenous leukemia that had developed from myelodysplastic syndrome, having written two books arguing that illness should be stripped of its metaphors. She is buried at Montparnasse in Paris. Her long relationships with women, including one with Annie Leibovitz from 1989 until her death, she did not discuss publicly, and several obituaries omitted them. Critics faulted the silence. She called it the open secret she had grown up with, and said she wondered whether she had repressed something to her own detriment. Her son David Rieff published her journals in 2008 and 2012. Sarajevo named a square for her in 2010.

Susan Sontag's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Against Interpretation and Other Essays book
  Carries "Notes on 'Camp'" and the case against decoding art 1966
• On Photography book
  National Book Critics Circle Award — and the attack on Diane Arbus 1977
• Illness as Metaphor book
  Written while she was being treated for breast cancer 1978
• The Volcano Lover book
  A best-selling historical novel at 59 1992
• In America book
  National Book Award for Fiction — later contested over unattributed passages 2000
• Regarding the Pain of Others book
  Reopens On Photography and takes back part of it 2003

• 1950 aged ~17 Marries Philip Rieff at 17 after a courtship of 10 days He was her sociology instructor at the University of Chicago. Their son David was born in 1952.
• 1958 aged ~25 Divorces Rieff and leaves for New York She had researched, and by one biographer's account largely written, the Freud study published under his name.
• 1964 aged ~31 Publishes "Notes on 'Camp'" in Partisan Review Her first major essay, and the one that made her a public figure at 31.
• 1966 aged ~33 Against Interpretation collects the argument against decoding art In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
• 1977 aged ~44 On Photography argues that images of suffering deaden the people who look It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and set the terms of photography criticism for a generation.
• November 24, 1986 aged 53 The New Yorker publishes "The Way We Live Now" Her AIDS story, told in a chorus of voices, and still a central text of the epidemic.
• 1993 aged ~60 Directs Waiting for Godot by candlelight in besieged Sarajevo The city had been cut off from electricity for years. The mayor made her an honorary citizen.
• September 24, 2001 aged 68 A New Yorker piece on the September 11 attacks draws ferocious attack She refused to call the hijackers cowards and tied the attacks to specific American alliances and actions.
• December 28, 2004 aged 71 Dies in New York of acute myelogenous leukemia Buried at Montparnasse in Paris.

• Diane Arbus 1923–1971
  Photographer whose square-format portraits remade American documentary photography attacked in On Photography
• Annie Leibovitz b. 1949
  Portrait photographer whose Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair work defined American celebrity imagery. partner
• Gore Vidal 1925–2012
  Novelist and essayist who wrote the United States as an empire in decline rival
• Edward Said 1935–2003
  His 1978 book Orientalism argued that Western knowledge of the East was built inside imperial power, and it remade several humanities fields. ally
• Harold Bloom 1930–2019
  Argued that great poems are deliberate misreadings of earlier ones, then fought the canon wars in public. dismissed by
• Pauline Kael 1919–2001
  The New Yorker's film critic from 1968 to 1991, who turned reviewing into a first-person argument and picked the fights that defined the field. rival critic