Susan Sontag Biography Quotes 49 Report mistakes

49 Quotes
Occup.	Author
From	USA
Born	January 28, 1933 New York City, New York, USA
Died	December 28, 2004 New York City, New York, USA
Cause	Leukemia
Aged	71 years

Early Life and Education
Susan Sontag was born in New York City in 1933 as Susan Rosenblatt and spent parts of her childhood in Tucson and Los Angeles. Her father died when she was young, and after her mother remarried she took her stepfather's surname, Sontag. Precocious and voracious in her reading, she entered the University of Chicago at sixteen. There she encountered an intense intellectual milieu that shaped her lifelong habits of inquiry, and there she married the sociologist Philip Rieff. Their son, the writer and editor David Rieff, was born during this period. After Chicago, Sontag pursued graduate study at Harvard and later continued studies at Oxford and in Paris, deepening her engagement with philosophy, literature, and continental thought.

Emergence as an Essayist and Novelist
Sontag settled in New York at the start of the 1960s, supporting herself through teaching and freelance writing while immersing in the city's cultural life. She quickly became known for essays that tested the boundaries between criticism and art-making. Notes on Camp (1964) turned a subcultural sensibility into a subject of serious discussion, and Against Interpretation (1966) announced a critical temperament that prized form, style, and sensuous appreciation as much as, and sometimes more than, interpretation. She published the novels The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967), pushing fiction toward parable and dream. Editors such as Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein at The New York Review of Books provided a forum in which her voice reached an international audience.

Style, Themes, and Intellectual Milieu
Sontag cultivated a cosmopolitan canon that included writers and thinkers like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Antonin Artaud, and her essays often introduced their ideas to an American readership. She was both diagnostician and partisan, writing with lapidary exactness about photography, theater, cinema, and the avant-garde. Styles of Radical Will (1969) consolidated her reputation with essays on politics, art, and the ethics of attention. On Photography (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, interrogated how images shape memory, power, and conscience. She returned to these questions in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), a late work that re-examined the ethics of looking at suffering.

Film, Theater, and International Engagement
Beyond the page, Sontag wrote and directed films including Duett for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), and the documentary Promised Lands (1974). She championed experimental theater and later directed Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo in 1993, an act of solidarity that made her a symbol of cultural resistance during the Bosnian war. Her circle encompassed poets and dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky and Vaclav Havel, and she stood publicly with writers like Salman Rushdie and Edward Said when freedom of expression was under threat. She also served as president of PEN American Center, advocating for imprisoned and persecuted authors worldwide.

Illness, Reflection, and Later Work
A diagnosis of cancer in the 1970s prompted Illness as Metaphor (1978), a coolly argued attempt to strip disease of punitive myths and moralizing metaphors; a decade later she extended the argument in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988). The 1990s brought a new phase in her fiction: The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999) married archival research to narrative verve, the latter receiving the National Book Award. Throughout these years, her longtime companion and collaborator Annie Leibovitz photographed her at work and at home, and their shared projects and travels were part of Sontag's public and private life. With David Rieff, she maintained a durable, sometimes demanding intellectual partnership that included editorial exchanges and, later, his stewardship of her legacy.

Recognition and Influence
Sontag received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, honorary degrees, and literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet her influence rests less on accolades than on the audacity and range of her concerns. She wrote with equal conviction about camp and classicism, modernist form and mass culture, illness and war. She exemplified a kind of public intellectualism that moved between the academy and the street, between New York and European capitals, between close reading and political witness. Even when her positions provoked controversy, she kept faith with a demanding ideal of seriousness that resisted cynicism and cliché.

Final Years and Legacy
Sontag continued to lecture, write, and travel into the early 2000s. She died in New York in 2004 from leukemia, and was later buried in Paris. After her death, David Rieff wrote movingly about her final illness, offering an intimate counterpoint to the voice readers had come to know. The editors, artists, and writers among whom she worked and argued remembered her as a writer who made difficulty desirable: she invited readers to be braver, more attentive, and more exacting about what art and thought can do. Her books, especially Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and Regarding the Pain of Others, remain touchstones for anyone seeking to understand the moral and aesthetic stakes of modern culture.

Our collection contains 49 quotes who is written by Susan, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Wisdom - Truth - Love.

Other people realated to Susan: Christopher Hitchens (Author), Diane Arbus (Photographer), Kenneth Burke (Philosopher), Alison Lurie (Novelist), Paul Bailey (Novelist)

Susan Sontag Famous Works