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Susan Sontag was born in New York in 1933 and grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Southern California. She graduated from high school in Los Angeles aged fifteen, when she went on to the University of California at Berkeley. She pursued her university career at the University of Chicago. There she met and married social psychologist Philip Rieff. Their son, David, was born in 1952. Sontag went on to take two MA degrees at Harvard, in English literature and philosophy, and then won a scholarship to Oxford, although she soon moved to Paris, where she lived and worked for a year.
She and Rieff were divorced in 1959. That year, she moved to New York with her son and began lecturing and writing. During the 1960s she established herself as a cultural critic through her writing for Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, and most particularly for a series of essays including 'Against Interpretation', 'On Style' and Notes on Camp.
Sontag wrote four highly acclaimed novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and eight books of non-fiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and Its Metaphors and Where the Stress Falls.
Regarding the Pain of Others, her final book, was first published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton in 2003.
Sontag also wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl in Sweden, Promised Lands in Israel and Unguided Tour in Italy.
In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Among her other honours are the Italian Malaparte Prize, which she received in 1992, and the 2000 National Book Award for In America. In 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow. Her writing is translated into thirty-two languages.
Susan Sontag died of leukaemia in New York in December 2004. She will be sorely missed by all who knew her and worked with her.
'It's hard to think of any American author or intellectual who would be as sincerely mourned as Susan will be' Christopher Hitchens
'One of the most lionized presences in twentieth-century letters … For four decades her work was part of the contemporary canon' Margalit Fox, The New York Times
'I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate' Carlos Fuentes, Times Magazine
'She was a unique and courageous woman. Even if you didn't agree with her, she was always courageous and always a unique thinker' Margaret Atwood
'If Sontag had lived for another decade, the esteem in which many international critics held her might have won her the Nobel Prize for literature' Carlin Romano
'A public intellectual, a person with the right, even the duty, to put forth ideas, as a contribution to the society's discussion of its life' Joan Acocella, New Yorker
'One of the most brilliant minds and sharpest pairs of eyes of her generation' Ed Vulliamy, Observer
Obituaries of Susan Sontag can be found at the following links:
Ed Vulliamy in the Observer
José Saramago in El Pais
Carlin Romano in the Chronicle Review
The Times Online
Christopher Hitchens in Slate
Read more about Susan Sontag and her books
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