Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a highly influential novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and cultural critic.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Storyteller was a highly influential novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and cultural critic. Often seen as a highly polarizing figure, she championed the blurring of boundaries between high and low culture and an aesthetic approach to culture that valued style over content. Though perhaps best remembered today for her cultural criticism it is through her works of fiction that her philosophical ideas are explored most deeply. Please welcome Susan Sontag.
Susan Rosenblatt was born in New York City on January 16, 1933 to Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. She was the first of their two daughters.
Susan’s father worked as a fur trader in China and spent most of his time overseas during Susan’s early years. He was often joined by his wife Mildred, leaving their young daughters in the care of relatives. When Susan was 5, her father died in China of tuberculosis.
Soon after her husband’s death, Mildred decided to move the small family from New York City to Tucson, Arizona in order to find relief for Susan’s childhood asthma. While there, Mildred met a World War II veteran named Nathan Sontag and the two were soon married. Though Nathan never adopted Susan and her sister officially, both girls started using his last name.
After the marriage, the Sontag family moved from Arizona to Los Angeles, where Susan attended high school. There, she excelled academically, graduating with honors when she was just 15 years old. The following year she enrolled at UC Berkeley, where she spent a semester before transferring to the University of Chicago to study ancient history, philosophy, and literature. She continued to excel academically and graduated with honors after fewer than 3 years.
During her time at the University of Chicago, Susan wandered into a class taught by a 28 year old sociologist named Phillip Rieff. The two were immediately smitten with each other and after just 10 days of dating, they got married.
The following year, after Susan’s graduation, she and Phillip moved to Boston. Susan chose to attend Harvard for graduate school, first earning a Masters in English in 1954, and then a second Masters in Philosophy a year later. In 1952, the young couple also welcomed their first child, a son named David.
In 1957, Susan received a prestigious fellowship to study at Oxford University for a year, but made it less than a semester before transferring to the Sorbonne in Paris. She found the intellectual and cultural scene in Paris to be more her style, and often referred to this period as the most formative time in her life. While in Paris, Susan and her husband divorced and Susan began a relationship with the famed avant garde playwright Maria Irene Fornes.
In 1959, Susan moved to New York City to live with Maria and to regain custody of her son. To make ends meet, she worked as an editor at Commentary Magazine and taught classes in philosophy and religious philosophy at Sarah Lawrence, City College, and Columbia. At the same time, she worked diligently at what she saw as her true calling: writing fiction.
At the age of 30, Susan published her first novel, an experimental work called The Benefactor, which the New York Times described as “an exploration of consciousness and dreams.” The following year she published perhaps her most famous piece of nonfiction, the widely read essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” which was a meditation on ‘Camp’ as an art form and an argument for the recognition of low art in general.
She wrote, "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on refinement. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak.”
In 1967, Susan published her second novel, Death Kit, which was the last work of fiction she would publish for over a decade. Though she vastly preferred writing fiction to non-fiction, her fame in these early years was heavily derived from her notoriety as a cultural critic and her essays were highly coveted by publishers. Susan herself found the process of writing a 30 page essay to be tedious and miserable. She would sometimes work for up to a year revising a piece that length.
In 1975, at the age of 42, Susan was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctors gave her a dire prognosis: less than a 10 percent chance of surviving for two years. But Susan was not deterred. She did deep research into possible treatments and eventually convinced her doctors to perform a mastectomy and to put her on a two and a half year course of radiation therapy.
Out of this experience came her famous work “Illness as Metaphor,” which explores the ways in which we as a culture mythologize disease and the experience of being ill. She particularly takes issue with the use of militaristic language when referring to disease, such as “battling a disease.” She wrote that that kind of language marginalizes the ill and holds them responsible for their condition and outcome.
Susan continued writing on this theme when she published her highly acclaimed short story “The Way We Live Now” in a November 1986 issue of The New Yorker. The experimental piece was told entirely in the form of fragments of whispered conversation from the friends of an unnamed man dying in a hospital of AIDS. At a time when many Americans were learning about AIDS for the first time, it was an extraordinarily important and impactful piece and remains a classic work in the literature of the AIDS epidemic.
After years of focusing predominantly on essays of cultural criticism, Susan turned back to fiction. In 1992, she published a novel called “The Volcano Lover.” Though it’s known as a novel of ideas, with a particular focus on the exploration of aesthetic conceptions and obsessive consumption, it takes the form of a historical romance set amidst the 18thcentury aristocracy. After receiving excellent reviews, “The Volcano Lover” became a bestseller.
Susan published her final novel “In America” in 2000 at the age of 67. Another piece of historical fiction, the story is loosely based on the life of the 19thcentury Polish actress Helen Modjeska who moved to California to start her own Utopian community. Susan won a National Book Award for the work, though allegations of plagiarism later surfaced, which Susan denied.
On December 28, 2004, Susan died in New York City from complications related to acute myelogenous leukemia. She was 71 years old.
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