Susan Sontag

Sontag, Susan - sŏnˈtäg, 1933–, American writer and critic, b. New York City. She grew up in Arizona and California and studied philosophy at the Univ. of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford. Regarded as a brilliant and original thinker, Sontag became known for her critical essays on avant-garde culture in the 1960s. Most of these were collected in Against Interpretation (1966), in which she popularized the word camp, referring to exaggerated reproductions of the style and emotions of pop culture. Her other works include short stories and such novels as The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), and the best-selling historical fictions, The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000). Her essays on radical politics are collected in Styles of Radical Will (1969). She meditated on the nature of photography in On Photography (1977), explored the ways in which disease is demonized in Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), and reassessed her ideas on photography's relationship to human suffering in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Many of her short nonfiction pieces from the 1980s and 90s were collected in Where the Stress Falls (2001). Sontag has also written and directed motion pictures, including Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Promised Lands (1974), and she has written a play, Alice in Bed (1992).

See Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995), ed. by L. Poague; biography by C. E. Rollyson and L. Paddock (2000); studies by S. Sayres (1990), L. Kennedy (1995), and C. E. Rollyson (2001).

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