Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (/snt/; January 16, 1933 December

28, 2004) was an American writer and lmmaker, teacher
and political activist, publishing her rst major work, the
essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best known works
include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of
Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor,
Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In
America.

While studying at Chicago, Sontag attended a summer

school taught by the Sociologist Hans Heinrich Gerth who
became a friend and subsequently inuenced her study
of German thinkers.[9] Upon completing her Chicago degree, Sontag taught freshman English at the University
of Connecticut for the 195253 academic year. She
attended Harvard University for graduate school, initially studying literature with Perry Miller and Harry
Levin before moving into philosophy and theology under
Paul Tillich, Jacob Taubes, Raphael Demos and Morton
White.[10] After completing her Master of Arts in philosophy, she began doctoral research into metaphysics,
ethics, Greek philosophy and Continental philosophy and
theology at Harvard.[11] The philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rie for a year while working on his 1955 book Eros and Civilization.[12]:38 Sontag
researched and contributed to Ries 1959 study Freud:
The Mind of the Moralist prior to their divorce in 1958.
The couple had a son, David Rie, who later became his
mothers editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a
writer.

Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conict, including during the Vietnam
War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively
about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness,
human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. The
New York Review of Books called her one of the most inuential critics of her generation.[2] However, her essays
and speeches sometimes drew criticism.[3]

Early life and education

Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City,

the daughter of Mildred (ne Jacobson) and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jews of Lithuanian[4] and Polish descent. Her
father managed a fur trading business in China, where
he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was ve
years old.[1] Seven years later, her mother married U.S.
Army Captain Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister, Judith, were given their stepfathers surname, although he
never adopted them formally.[1] Sontag did not have a religious upbringing and claimed not to have entered a synagogue until her mid-twenties.[5] Remembering an unhappy childhood, with a cold, distant mother who was
always away, Sontag lived in Long Island, New York,[1]
then in Tucson, Arizona, and later in the San Fernando
Valley in Southern California, where she took refuge in
books and graduated from North Hollywood High School
at the age of 15. She began her undergraduate studies
at the University of California, Berkeley but transferred
to the University of Chicago in admiration of its famed
core curriculum. At Chicago, she undertook studies in
philosophy, ancient history and literature alongside her
other requirements. Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Christian Mackauer, Richard McKeon, Peter von Blanckenhagen and Kenneth Burke were among her lecturers. She
graduated with an A.B.[6] While at Chicago, she became
best friends with fellow student Mike Nichols.[7]

Sontag was awarded an American Association of University Women's fellowship for the 19571958 academic
year to St Annes College, Oxford, where she traveled
without her husband and son.[13] There, she had classes
with Iris Murdoch, Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer and H.
L. A. Hart while also attending the B. Phil seminars of
J. L. Austin and the lectures of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford
did not appeal to her, however, and she transferred after
Michaelmas term of 1957 to the University of Paris.[14]
In Paris, Sontag socialized with expatriate artists and
academics including Allan Bloom, Jean Wahl, Alfred
Chester, Harriet Sohmers and Mara Irene Forns.[15]
Sontag remarked that her time in Paris was, perhaps, the
most important period of her life.[12]:5152 It certainly provided the basis of her long intellectual and artistic association with the culture of France.[16] She moved to
New York in 1959 to live with Forns for the next seven
years,[17] regaining custody of her son[13] and teaching at
universities while her literary reputation grew.[12]:5354

1.1 Fiction

Sontags literary career began and ended with works of

ction. While working on her ction, Sontag taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and City UniverAt 17, Sontag married writer Philip Rie, who was a so- sity of New York and the Philosophy of Religion with
ciology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a Jacob Taubes, Susan Taubes, Theodor Gaster, and Hans
ten-day courtship; the marriage lasted for eight years.[8] Jonas, in the Religion Department at Columbia Univer1

2 ACTIVISM

sity from 1960 to 1964. Sontag held a writing fellowship

at Rutgers University for 1964 to 1965 before ending her
relationship with academia in favor of full-time freelance
writing.[12]:5657
At age 30, she published an experimental novel called
The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with
Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer
of ction. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was
published to great acclaim on November 24, 1986 in The
New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style,
it remains a signicant text on the AIDS epidemic. She
achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist
with The Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her nal novel In America (2000). The last two
novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her
greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice.
She wrote and directed four lms and also wrote several
plays, the most successful of which were Alice in Bed and
Lady from the Sea.

1.2

She also states that photography desensitizes its audience

to horric human experiences, and children are exposed
to experiences before they are ready for them.[18]:20
Sontag continued to theorize about the role of photography in real life in her essay Looking at War: Photographys View of Devastation and Death, which appeared
in the December 9, 2002 issue of The New Yorker. There
she concludes that the problem of our reliance on images and especially photographic images is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs ... that the photographic image
eclipses other forms of understanding and remembering. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a
story but to be able to call up a picture (p. 94).
She became a role-model for many feminists and aspiring
female writers during the 1960s and 1970s.[12]

2 Activism

Nonction

It was through her essays that Sontag gained early fame

and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art and expanded the dichotomy
concept of form and art in every medium. She elevated
camp to the status of recognition with her widely read
1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp', which accepted art as including common, absurd and burlesque themes.
In 1977, Sontag published the series of essays On Photography. These essays are an exploration of photographs as
a collection of the world, mainly by travelers or tourists,
and the way we experience it. In the essays, she outlined
her theory of taking pictures as you travel:
The method especially appeals to people
handicapped by a ruthless work ethic Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven
feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have
something to do that is like a friendly imitation
of work: they can take pictures. (p. 10)
Sontag writes that the convenience of modern photography has created an overabundance of visual material, and
just about everything has been photographed.[18]:3 This
has altered our expectations of what we have the right to
view, want to view or should view. In teaching us a new
visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of
what is worth looking at and what we have the right to
observe and has changed our viewing ethics.[18]:3 Photographs have increased our access to knowledge and experiences of history and faraway places, but the images
may replace direct experience and limit reality.[18]:1024

The former Sarajevo newspaper building during the Siege of

Sarajevo, when Sontag lived in the city

During 1989 Sontag was the President of PEN American

Center, the main U.S. branch of the International PEN
writers organization. After Iranian leader Ayatollah
Khomeini issued a fatwa death sentence against writer
Salman Rushdie for blasphemy after the publication of
his novel The Satanic Verses that year, Sontags uncompromising support of Rushdie was crucial in rallying
American writers to his cause.[19]
A few years later, during the Siege of Sarajevo, Son-

3
tag gained attention for directing a production of Samuel
Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a candlelit Sarajevo theatre
in the city, that Kevin Myers in the Daily Telegraph called
mesmerisingly precious and hideously self-indulgent.
Myers wrote, By my personal reckoning, the performance lasted as long as the siege itself. [20] However,
her involvement with the city was well regarded by many
of its besieged residents:
To the people of Sarajevo, Ms. Sontag has
become a symbol, interviewed frequently by
the local newspapers and television, invited to
speak at gatherings everywhere, asked for autographs on the street. After the opening performance of the play, the citys Mayor, Muhamed
Kresevljakovic, came onstage to declare her an
honorary citizen, the only foreigner other than
the recently departed United Nations commander, Lieut. Gen. Phillippe Morillon, to be so
named. It is for your bravery, in coming here,
living here, and working with us, he said.[21]

history, who regard the white race as a cancer

and assert that the United States was founded
on a genocide, may fantasize that the Indians fought according to the rules of the Geneva
Convention. But in the tragic conict of which
they were to be the chief victims, they were capable of striking terrible blows.[25]
In Sontag, Bloody Sontag, an essay in her 1994 book
Vamps & Tramps, Camille Paglia describes her initial admiration and subsequent disillusionment:
Sontags cool exile was a disaster for the
American womens movement. Only a woman
of her prestige could have performed the necessary critique and debunking of the rst
instant-canon feminist screeds, such as those
of Kate Millett or Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled
womens studies from the start. No patriarchal
villains held Sontag back; her failures are her
own.

Criticism

Paglia mentions several criticisms of Sontag, including

Harold Bloom's comment on Paglias doctoral dissertaSontag drew criticism for writing in 1967 in the Partisan tion, of Mere Sontagisme!" This had become synonyReview that,
mous with a shallow kind of hip posturing. Paglia also
describes Sontag as a sanctimonious moralist of the oldguard literary world, and tells of a visit by Sontag to
If America is the culmination of WestBennington College, in which she arrived hours late, igern white civilization, as everyone from the
nored the agreed-upon topic of the event, and made an
Left to the Right declares, then there must be
incessant series of ridiculous demands. Similar behavior
something terribly wrong with Western white
was reported when she staged her Godot; one observer
civilization. This is a painful truth; few of
recalled, I have never seen anything as degrading and
us want to go that far. The truth is that
insuerable as her conduct towards the Sarajevans. . . .
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare,
[S]he never listened to any of them but only uttered lordly
parliamentary government, baroque churches,
pronouncements as she held court in the Sarajevo HoliNewton, the emancipation of women, Kant,
day Inn, while outside scores daily died.[26] The literary
Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem
critic Terry Castle once wrote of clucking sympathetiwhat this particular civilization has wrought
cally at her constant kvetching: about the stupidity and
upon the world. The white race is the canphilistinism of whatever local sap was paying for her leccer of human history; it is the white race and
ture trip, how no one had yet appreciated the true worth of
it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich
her novel The Volcano Lover, how you couldnt nd a deeradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it
cent dry cleaner in downtown San Francisco etc, etc.[27]
spreads, which has upset the ecological balance
of the planet, which now threatens the very exEllen Lee accused Sontag of plagiarism when Lee discovistence of life itself.[22]
ered at least twelve passages in In America that were similar to, or copied from, passages in four other books about
Helena Modjeska without attribution.[28][29] Sontag said
about using the passages, All of us who deal with real
characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources
in the original domain. I've used these sources and I've
completely transformed them. Theres a larger argument
In a 1970 article titled America as a Gun Culture, the to be made that all of literature is a series of references
and allusions.[30]
noted historian Richard Hofstadter wrote:
At a New York pro-Solidarity rally in 1982, Sontag stated
Modern critics of our culture who, like Suthat people on the left, like herself, have willingly or
san Sontag, seem to know nothing of American
unwillingly told a lot of lies.[31] She added that they:
According to journalist Mark M. Goldblatt, Sontag later
recanted this statement, saying that it slandered cancer
patients,[23] though according to Eliot Weinberger, She
came to regret that last phrase, and wrote a whole book
against the use of illness as metaphor.[24]

5 WORKS
believed in, or at least applied, a double
standard to the angelic language of Communism.. Communism is Fascismsuccessful
Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be
overthrownthat has, largely, failed. I repeat:
not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the
probable destiny of all Communist societies
especially when their populations are moved
to revoltbut Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism.
Fascism with a human face... Imagine, if you
will, someone who read only the Readers Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in
the same period who read only The Nation
or [t]he New Statesman. Which reader would
have been better informed about the realities
of Communism? The answer, I think, should
give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were
right?[31]

Sontags speech reportedly drew boos and shouts from

the audience. The Nation published her speech, excluding the passage comparing the magazine with Readers
Digest. Responses included accusations that she had betrayed her ideals.[31]

(1967) Death Kit ISBN 0-312-42011-0

(1977) I, etcetera (Collection of short stories) ISBN
0-374-17402-4
(1991) The Way We Live Now (short story) ISBN
0-374-52305-3
(1992) The Volcano Lover ISBN 1-55800-818-7
(1999) In America ISBN 1-56895-898-6 winner of the 2000 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[36]

5.2 Plays
The Way We Live Now (1990) about the AIDS epidemic
A Parsifal (1991), a deconstruction inspired by
Robert Wilson's 1991 staging of the Wagner
opera[37]
Alice in Bed (1993), about 19th century intellectual,
Alice James, who was conned to bed by illness[38]

Sontag received angry criticism for her remarks in The

Lady from the Sea, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's
New Yorker (September 24, 2001) about the immedi1888 play of the same name, premiered in 1998 in
ate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.[32] In
Italy.[39] Sontag wrote an essay about it in 1999 in
her commentary, she criticized U.S. public ocials and
Theatre called Rewriting Lady from the Sea".[40]
media commentators for trying to convince the American public that everything is O.K. Specically, she argued that the perpetrators were not cowards and that we
should acknowledge that this was not a 'cowardly' attack 5.3 Nonction
on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world'
but an attack on the worlds self-proclaimed superpower, 5.3.1 Collections of essays
undertaken as a consequence of specic American al (1966) Against Interpretation ISBN 0-385-26708-8
liances and actions.[33]
(includes Notes on Camp)
Tom Wolfe once dismissed Sontag as just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and
(1969) Styles of Radical Will ISBN 0-312-42021-8
lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style,
which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan
(1980) Under the Sign of Saturn ISBN 0-374Review.[34]
28076-2

Cultural references

In the lm Bull Durham, Kevin Costner says that he

believes the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent,
overrated crap.[35]

(2001) Where the Stress Falls ISBN 0-374-28917-4

(2002) Regarding the Pain of Others ISBN 0-37424858-3
(2007) At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches ISBN
0-374-10072-1 (edited by Paolo Dilonardo and
Anne Jump, with a foreword by David Rie)

Works

5.1

Fiction

(1963) The Benefactor ISBN 0-385-26710-X

Sontag also published nonction essays in The New

Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary
Supplement, The Nation, Granta, Partisan Review and the
London Review of Books.

5
5.3.2

Monographs

(1977) On Photography ISBN 0-374-22626-1

(1978) Illness as Metaphor ISBN 0-394-72844-0
(1988) AIDS and Its Metaphors (a continuation of
Illness as Metaphor) ISBN 0-374-10257-0
(2003) Regarding the Pain of Others ISBN 0-37424858-3

5.4

Films

(1969) Duett fr kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals)

(1971) Broder Carl (Brother Carl)
(1974) Promised Lands
(1983) Unguided Tour AKA Letter from Venice

5.5

Other works

(2002) Liner notes for the Patti Smith album Land

(2004) Contribution of phrases to Fischerspooner's
third album Odyssey
(2008) Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 19471963
(2012) As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 19641980

2004: Two days after her death, Muhidin

Hamamdzic, the mayor of Sarajevo announced the
city would name a street after her, calling her an
author and a humanist who actively participated in
the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia.
Theatre Square outside the National Theatre was
promptly proposed to be renamed Susan Sontag
Theatre Square.[41] It took 5 years, however, for
that tribute to become ocial.[42][43] On January 13,
2010, the city of Sarajevo posted a plate with a new
street name for Theater Square: Theater Square of
Susan Sontag.[42]

Awards and honors

1978: National Book Critics Circle Award for On
Photography
1990: MacArthur Fellowship
1992: Malaparte Prize, Italy

7 Personal life
Sontags mother died of lung cancer in Hawaii in 1986.[1]
Sontag had a close romantic relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz. They met in 1989, when both
had already established notability in their careers. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work. During Sontags lifetime,
neither woman publicly disclosed whether the relationship was a friendship or romantic in nature. Newsweek
in 2006 made reference to Leibovitzs decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating, The two rst met in the
late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book
jacket. They never lived together, though they each had
an apartment within view of the others.[44] Leibovitz,
when interviewed for her 2006 book A Photographers
Life: 1990-2005, said the book told a number of stories, and that with Susan, it was a love story.[45] While
The New York Times in 2009 referred to Sontag as Leibovitzs companion,[46] Leibovitz wrote in A Photographers Life that, Words like 'companion' and 'partner'
were not in our vocabulary. We were two people who
helped each other through our lives. The closest word
is still 'friend.'" [47] That same year, Leibovitz said the
descriptor lover was accurate.[48] She later reiterated,
Call us 'lovers. I like 'lovers.' You know, 'lovers sounds
romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love
Susan.[49]

1999: Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des LetSontag died in New York City on 28 December
tres, France
2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic
syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous
2000: National Book Award for In America[36]
leukemia. She is buried in Paris at Cimetire du Mont 2001: Jerusalem Prize, awarded every two years to parnasse.[50] Her nal illness has been chronicled by her
a writer whose work explores the freedom of the in- son, David Rie.[51]
dividual in society.
2002: George Polk Award, for Cultural Criticism
7.1
for Looking at War, in The New Yorker

Sexuality and relationships

2003: Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Sontag became aware of her bisexuality during her early
(Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels) during teens and at 15 wrote in her diary, I feel I have lesbian
the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse). tendencies (how reluctantly I write this)". At 16, she had
a sexual encounter with a woman: Perhaps I was drunk,
2003: Prince of Asturias Award on Literature.
after all, because it was so beautiful when H began mak-

10 NOTES

ing love to me...It had been 4:00 before we had gotten ing it from bit rot, are the subject of the book On Excess:
to bed...I became fully conscious that I desired her, she Susan Sontags Born-Digital Archive, by Jeremy Schmidt
knew it, too.[52][53]
& Jacquelyn Ardam.[62]
Sontag lived with 'H', the writer and model Harriet
Sohmers Zwerling whom she rst met at U. C. Berkeley
from 1958 to 1959. Afterwards, Sontag was the partner
of Mara Irene Forns, a Cuban-American avant garde
playwright and director. Upon splitting with Fornes,
she was involved with an Italian aristocrat, Carlotta Del
Pezzo, and the German academic Eva Kollisch.[54] Sontag was romantically involved with the American artists
Jasper Johns and Paul Thek.[55] During the early 1970s,
Sontag lived with Nicole Stphane, a Rothschild banking
heiress turned movie actress,[56] and, later, the choreographer Lucinda Childs.[57] She also had a relationship with
the writer Joseph Brodsky.[58] With Annie Leibovitz,
Sontag maintained a relationship stretching from the later
1980s until her nal years.[59]
In an interview in The Guardian in 2000, Sontag was
quite open about being bisexual: "'Shall I tell you about
getting older?', she says, and she is laughing. 'When you
get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a
young man. I love beauty. So whats new?' She says she
has been in love seven times in her life. 'No, hang on,'
she says. 'Actually, its nine. Five women, four men.'"[1]
Many of Sontags obituaries failed to mention her signicant same-sex relationships, most notably that with Annie
Leibovitz. In response to this criticism, New York Times
Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, defended the newspapers
obituary, stating that at the time of Sontags death, a reporter could make no independent verication of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do
so).[60] After Sontags death, Newsweek published an article about Annie Leibovitz that made clear references to
her decade-plus relationship with Sontag.[59]

9 Documentary
A documentary about Sontag, titled Regarding Susan Sontag, premiered in 2014.[63] It was directed by Nancy
Kates, and received the Special Jury Mention for Best
Documentary Feature at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.[63][64]

10 Notes
[1] Finding fact from ction. London: The Guardian.
2000-05-27. Retrieved 2007-06-19.
[2] Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books, accessed
December 19, 2012
[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=Qc63EF-mVukC&
printsec=frontcover&dq=%22hooking+
up%22+Tom+Wolfe&hl=en&sa=X&ei=
GB1OVcb1G6bjsASJmoGABQ&ved=
0CBoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22who%20was%
20this%20woman%22was%20this%20woman&f=false
[4] http://www.dw.de/susan-sontag-receives-german-peace-prize-criticizes-us/
a-994715
[5] Susan Sontag | Jewish Womens Archive. Jwa.org. Retrieved 2012-06-13.
[6] A Gluttonous Reader, Interview with M. McQuade in
Poague, pp. 271278.
[7] Turow, Scott (16 May 2013). A Time When Things

Started in Chicago. The New York Times. Retrieved 19

Sontag was quoted by Editor-in-Chief Brendan Lemon
May 2013.
of Out magazine as saying I grew up in a time when
the modus operandi was the 'open secret'. I'm used to
[8] Sontag, Susan. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947
that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I
1963, ed. D. Rie, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p.
haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder
144.
if I haven't repressed something there to my detriment.
Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I [9] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXJe3EcPo1g
and http://newfoundpress.utk.edu//pubs/vidich/chp10.
had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more,
pdf.
but its never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebodys in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure,
[10] See Susan Sontag, 'Literature is Freedom' in At the Same
or shake things up.
Time, ed. P. Dilonardo and A. Jump, Farrar, Straus

Digital archive

and Giroux, 2007, p.206 and Morton White, A Philosophers Story, Pennsylvania University Press, 1999, p. 148.
See also Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 3940 and Daniel
Horowitz Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World, University of Pennsylvania, 2012, p. 314.

Sontag used a PowerBook 5300, a PowerMac G4, and an

iBook. A digital archive of 17,198 of Sontags emails is [11] See Rollyson and Paddock, p.
39; and J.
kept by the U.C.L.A. Department of Special Collections
McLaughlin 'Putting Her Body Into It' at
at the Charles E. Young Research Library.[61] Her archive
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Post-Script/
and the eorts to make it publicly available while protect172833464.html.

[12] Rollyson and Paddock.

[13] Sante, Luc. Sontag: The Precocious Years, Sunday
Book Review, The New York Times, January 29, 2009,
accessed December 19, 2012
[14] See Morton White, A Philosophers Story, Pennsylvania
University Press, 1999, p.148; and Rollyson and Paddock,
pp. 4345
[15] Field, Edward. The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag,
Wisconsin, 2005, pp. 158170; Rollyson and Paddock,
pp. 4550; and Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947
1963, ed. D. Rie, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, pp.
188189.
[16] An Emigrant of Thought, interview with Jean-Louis
Servan-Schreiber, in Poague, pp. 143164
[17] Moore, Patrick. Susan Sontag and a Case of Curious
Silence, Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2005, accessed
December 18, 2012
[18] Sontag, Susan, On Photography, 1977
[19] Hitchens, Christopher. Assassins of the Mind, Vanity
Fair, February 2009, accessed December 18, 2012
[20] Personal View (January 2, 2005). I wish I had kicked
Susan Sontag. London: Telegraph. Retrieved 2012-0613.
[21] John F. Burns (August 19, 1993). To Sarajevo, Writer
Brings Good Will and 'Godot'". New York Times. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
[22] Sontag, Susan (1967). Whats Happening to America?
(A Symposium)". Partisan Review 34 (1): 578.
[23] Goldblatt, Mark (January 3, 2005). Susan Sontag: Remembering an intellectual heroine.. The American Spectator. American Spectator Foundation. Retrieved March
17, 2013.
[24] Weinberger, Eliot (2007). Notes on Susan. The New
York Review of Books 54 (13): 2729. Retrieved 27
March 2014.
[25] Hofstadter, Richard: America as a Gun Culture. American Heritage Magazine, October, 1970.
[26] Myers, Kevin (January 2, 2005). I wish I had kicked
Susan Sontag. The Daily Telegraph (London).
[27] https://costelevision.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/
david-tischllere-susan-sontag-new-york-review-of-books/
[28] Marsh B. (2007) Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in
Higher Education, SUNY Press.
[29] Kort C (2007) A to Z of American Women Writers, Infobase Publishing.
[30] Carvajal, Doreen. (May 27, 2002) So Whose Words Are
They? Susan Sontag Creates a Stir. New York Times Book
Review.
[31] Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism. The
New York Times. 1982-02-27. Retrieved 2010-09-13.

[32] Novelist, Radical Susan Sontag, 71, Dies in New York,

The Washington Times, December 29, 2004, accessed December 19, 2012
[33] Sontag, Susan (24 September 2001). The Talk of the
Town. The New Yorker. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
[34] https://books.google.com/books?id=Qc63EF-mVukC&
printsec=frontcover&dq=%22hooking+up%22+tom+
wolfe&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VWqTVb5Hhvf5Aa-egNAJ&
ved=0CCAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Sontag&f=false
[35] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094812/quotes
[36] National Book Awards 2000, National Book Foundation, with essays by Jessica Hicks and Elizabeth Yale from
the Awards 60-year anniversary blog, accessed March 3,
2012
[37] Sontag, Susan (1991). Halpern, Daniel, ed. "A Parsifal".
Antaeus (New York: Ecco Press): 180185.
[38] Sontag, Susan (1993). Alice in Bed. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374102739. OCLC
28566109.
[39] Curty, Stefano. Sontag and Wilsons Lady from the Sea
World Premieres in Italy, May 5, Playbill, May 5, 1998,
accessed December 26, 2012
[40] Sontag, Susan (Summer 1999). Rewriting Lady from the
Sea". Theater (Duke University Press) 29 (1): 8991.
[41] accessmylibrary.com Sarajevo City Council accepted the
proposal on January 27, 2005.
[42] Sarajevo Theater Square ocially renamed to Theater
Square of Susan Sontag, sarajevo.co.ba
[43] Carter, Imogen (5 April 2009). Desperately thanking Susan. The Observer. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
[44] Cathleen McGuigan (October 2, 2006). Through Her
Lens. Newsweek. Archived from the original on October 25, 2007. Retrieved July 19, 2007.
[45] Janny Scott (October 6, 2006). From Annie Leibovitz:
Life, and Death, Examined. The New York Times. Retrieved July 19, 2007.
[46] Salkin, Allen (July 31, 2009). For Annie Leibovitz, a
Fuzzy Financial Picture. The New York Times. Retrieved
June 17, 2014.
[47] Brockes, Emma. My time with Susan. Retrieved 17
April 2013.
[48] Tom Ashbrook (October 17, 2006).
On Point.
Archived from the original on 10 July 2007. Retrieved
July 19, 2007.
[49] Guthmann, Edward (November 1, 2006). Love, family, celebrity, grief -- Leibovitz puts her life on display in
photo memoir. The San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved
July 19, 2007.
[50] ndagrave.com. Retrieved 2007-06-19.

13

EXTERNAL LINKS

[51] Katie Roiphe (2008-02-03). Swimming in a Sea of

Death: A Sons Memoir David Rie Book Review.
The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-02-23.

The Din in the Head. Essays by Cynthia Ozick ISBN

978-0-618-47050-1 See Forward: On Discord and
Desire.

[52] Susan Sontag: 'It was so beautiful when H began making

love to me', Paul Bignell, The Independent on Sunday, 16
November 2008

Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rie A memoir about Susan Sontags death by her son.

[53] Reborn: Early Diaries, 19471964, Penguin, January

2009
[54] See Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh,
p.262, 269.
[55] see
http://www.full-stop.net/2012/04/09/features/
essays/luban/the-passion-of-susan-sontag/ and Paul
Thek Artists Artist ed. H. Falckenberg.
[56] Leo Lerman, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo
Lerman, NY: Knopf, 2007, page 413

Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate

Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid
Nunez
McRobbie, Angela (22 January 2009). Susan Sontag: holding herself to account. Open Democracy.

13 External links
Susan Sontag, ocial website

[57] Susan Sontag (2006-09-10). On Self. The New York

Times Magazine. Retrieved 2008-02-23.

Edward Hirsch (Winter 1995). Susan Sontag, The

Art of Fiction No. 143. The Paris Review.

[58] See Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, p.31.

with Ramona Koval, Books and Writing, ABC Radio National, 30/1/2005

[59] McGuigan, Cathleen. Through Her Lens, Newsweek, 2

October 2006

Susan Sontag and Richard Howard from The

Writer, The Work, a series sponsored by PEN and
curated by Susan Sontag

[60] Michelangelo Signorile. Gay Abe, Sapphic Susan; On

the diculties of outing the dead.. New York Press.
[61] In the Sontag archives by Sontags biographer Benjamin
Moser in The New Yorker magazine, 30 January 2014
[62] On Excess: Susan Sontags Born-Digital Archive, by
Jeremy Schmidt & Jacquelyn Ardam, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 October 2014

Susan Sontag wrote an essay: On American Language and Culture from PEN American Center
The Politics of Translation: Discussion, with panel
members Susan Sontag, Esther Allen, Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Hofmann & Steve Wasserman, PEN
American Center

[63] Los Angeles Times (8 December 2014). "'Regarding

Susan Sontag' looks at a rock star of intellectuals. latimes.com.

Susan Sontag Photos by Mathieu Bourgois.

[64] Here Are Your TFF 2014 Award Winners. April 24,
2014. Retrieved August 31, 2014.

Fascinating Fascism illustrated text of Sontags seminal 1974 article on Nazi lmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's aesthetics, from Under the Sign of Saturn

11

Sontags comments in The New Yorker, September

24, 2001 about the September 11th attack on the
United States

References

Poague, Leland (ed.) Conversations with Susan Sontag, University of Mississippi Press, 1995 ISBN 087805-833-8
Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The
Making of an Icon, W. W. Norton, 2000

The Friedenspreis acceptance speech (2003-10-12)

Terry Castle, Desperately Seeking Susan, London

Review of Books, March 2005
Sheelah Kolhatkar, Notes on camp Sontag New
York Observer, January 8, 2005
Susan Sontag at the Internet Movie Database

12

Further reading

Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist ISBN 0-415-90031-X

Seligman, Craig. Sontag and Kael ISBN 1-58243311-9.

'Susan Sontag: The Collector', by Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Republic

A review of Reborn by James Patrick
Appearances on C-SPAN
In Depth interview with Sontag, March 2, 2003

14
14.1

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14.3

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