SONTAG, SUSAN

SONTAG, SUSAN (1933–2004), U.S. critic and author. Born in New York City, Susan Sontag taught philosophy and aesthetics at the City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, and from 1961 to 1965 at Columbia University. Her first novel, The Benefactor, was published in 1963, but her reputation grew largely from her literary criticism, which appeared throughout the 1960s in a number of journals and was collected in Against Interpretation (1966) and Styles of Radical Will (1969). Consciously avant-gardist, it argued for a purely formalistic approach to literary values, while at the same time seeking to reconcile this position with her left-wing political views. A second novel, Death Kit (1967), was concerned, like her first, with the relation between illusion and reality. She also wrote and directed a movie, Duet for Cannibals (1969). Later works include plays, among them Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes (1993). In addition to stories and essays, Sontag has written books that include the 1992 novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance. A selection of her writings was collected in the 1982 A Susan Sontag Reader. In her capacity as literary critic she has edited Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1988) and A Barthes Reader (1982). Her reflection on the relationships amongst photography, history, and perception, On Photography, appeared in 1977. Her own battle with cancer led her to write Illness as Metaphor (1978), followed in 1989 with a complementary study, Aids and Its Metaphors. In 2000, her sweeping novel of late 19th century America, and the fortunes of Maryna Zalezowska, was published with the title In America: A Novel. It received the National Book Award. Conversations with Susan Sontag, edited by Leland Pogue, appeared in 1995. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Sontag has been the recipient of many awards including the 1978 American National Book Critics prize. She was created Officier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres in France in 1984. -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Kennedy, Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995); C. Rollyson, Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work (2001); S. Sayres, Susan Sontag: the Elegiac Modernist (1990). (Rohan Saxena and Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)