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Susan SontagSusan Sontag (January 16, 1933–December 28, 2004) was a well-known American essayist, novelist, left-leaning intellectual and controversial activist. Life Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt and his wife, the former Mildred Jacobsen. After Jack, a Jewish fur trader, died in China, Susan's mother married Nathan Sontag, and Susan and her sister Judith took their stepfather's surname. Sontag was a third-generation Lithuanian-American. Sontag grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She skipped three grades and graduated from high school at 15. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard and St Anne's College, Oxford. At the age of 17 Sontag married Philip Rieff, following a ten-day courtship. The couple had a son, David Rieff, who later became his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and, subsequently, a writer. Sontag and Rieff were married for eight years and divorced in 1958. In the late 1980s Sontag began a relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz which lasted until 2003 (as reported in the New York Post, February 14, 2003). Sontag also had committed relationships with choreographer Lucinda Childs and other women, and in 2000 Ms. Sontag was quoted in a profile of her by Editor-In-Chief Brendan Lemon of Out magazine as saying ""I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the 'open secret.' I'm used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven't repressed something there to my detriment. ... Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up." In an interview in the Guardian (U.K.), Sontag disputed a romantic involvement with Annie Leibovitz http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,283623,00.html but was quite open about her bisexuality: - "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 what's new?" She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. "No, hang on," she says. "Actually, it's nine. Five women, four men."
Sontag died on December 28, 2004, from complications of acute myelogenous leukemia. She struggled with various forms of cancer for over 30 years, including breast cancer and a rare form of uterine cancer. Work Sontag's literary career both began and ended with works of fiction. 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 in the genre, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on November 26, 1986 in The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a key text on the AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success with The Volcano Lover (1992), and at age 67 published her final novel In America (2000). It was as an essayist, however, that Sontag gained early and lasting fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art. Her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" examined gay aesthetics, defining the "so bad it's good" concept in popular culture for the first time. She championed European writers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald, along with some Americans such as Maria Irene Fornes. Over the course of several decades she would turn her attention to novels, film and photography. In several books, she wrote about cultural attitudes toward illness. Activism In 1989 Sontag was the President of PEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of the International PEN writer's organization, at the time that Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (in this instance a death sentence) against writer Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which was perceived as blasphemous by Islamic fundamentalists. Her uncompromising support of Rushdie was critical in rallying American writers to his cause. A few years later, Sontag gained attention for directing Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" during the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo. Early in that conflict, Sontag referred to the Serbian invasion and massacre in Bosnia as the "Spanish Civil War of our time" and sparked controversy among U.S. Leftists for openly advocating for U.S. and European military intervention. Sontag lived in Sarajevo for many months of the Sarajevo siege. Controversies Sontag sparked controversy and later apologized for her remarks in The New Yorker (September 24, 2001) about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. Sontag wrote: - "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions... If the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Following her 9/11 comments, blogger and columnist Andrew Sullivan created a parody Sontag Award which he gives to persons who (in Sullivan's opinion) make egregious moral equivalents regarding the war on terror.http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2003_04_06_dish_archive.html#200130574 Sontag, a widely recognized figure, often prompted strong reactions. In an aside in a December 7, 2002, radio address on anti-Semitism http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/edkoch.asp, former New York City mayor Ed Koch stated that "Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell for her outrageous assaults on Israel. I will no longer read her works." Koch made no mention of specific writings by Sontag which offended him. Koch and Sontag are both Jewish. Many of Sontag's obituaries failed to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably with photographer Annie Leibovitz. This was widely reported by some blog siteshttp://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_01_02_dish_archive.html#110494343602883140 http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_01_02_dish_archive.html#110487169389650037 http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_01_02_dish_archive.html#110504242721452792 and the alternative press http://www.gaycitynews.com/gcn_354/thetimescuriousreticence.html http://www.baywindows.com/news/2005/01/06/NationalNews/Notes.On.susan-830801.shtml. In response to this criticism, The New York Times' Public Editor Daniel Okrent defended the newspaper's obituary, stating that at the time of Sontag's death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so). Works Fiction Nonfiction Collections of Essays Sontag has also published nonfiction essays in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Granta, Partisan Review and London Review of Books Monographs Awards and Honors - 2001: Was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded every two years to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society.
- 2004: Two days after her death, 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."
External links General - Susan Sontag, official website
- The Friedenspreis acceptance speech (2003-10-12)
- Fascinating Fascism (an article on Leni Riefenstahl, from Under the Sign of Saturn)
- Notes on "Camp"
- AfterImage article: a summary of the critical reception and subsequent undermining of most of the arguments made in Sontag's On Photography
- "GreeneSpace" entry on Sontag in Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
- Sontag's comments in the New Yorker, September 24, 2001 about the attack on the United States
- Preminuloj Suzan Zontang spomen-obilježje i ulica u gradu (in Bosnian)
- Sexing Susan Sontag
- Terry Castle, Desperately Seeking Susan, London Review of Books, March 2005
- Guardian interview May 27, 2000
- Sheelah Kolhatkar, "Notes on camp Sontag" New york Observer, January 8, 2005
Obituaries Sontag, Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag, Susan
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