Susan Sontag was an incandescent presence in American culture, whether as essayist, fiction writer, filmmaker, or political activist. As a critic, she became the most provocative and influential voice of her time. More than a commentator on her era, she helped shape it. This volume brings together four essential works of the 1960s and 70s, books whose intelligence and brilliant style confirm her credo that “the highest duty of a writer is to write well—to leave the language in better rather than worse shape after one’s passage…Language is the body, and also the soul, of consciousness.” With the publication of her first collection of critical essays, Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag took her place at the forefront of a period of cultural and political transformation. “What is important now,” she wrote, “is to recover our senses…In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Against Interpretation’s treatment of an astonishing range of subjects—camp sensibility, the films of Robert Bresson and Alain Resnais, the aesthetics of science-fiction and “happenings,” the work of such modern thinkers as Simone Weil and Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss—reveals Sontag as a catalyzing figure who opened provocative perspectives on every subject she addressed. In Styles of Radical Will (1969), Sontag collected two of her longest and most ambitious essays, “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “The Pornographic Imagination,” along with penetrating studies of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran (one of many important modern writers Sontag introduced to American readers), and “Trip to Hanoi,” the record of a journey made at the height of the Vietnam War, reflecting both her deepening political involvement and the relentless analysis of her own motives that accompanied it. On Photography (1977) began as a review of an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs and quickly evolved into an extended meditation on the premises and implications of photography as an art. Dazzlingly suggestive on every page, restlessly refusing to fall back on easy resolutions, it shows Sontag at the peak of her ability to connect disparate fields of thought and action, bringing aesthetics, history, politics, and philosophy into a common vision. Sontag’s own medical crisis led her to write Illness as Metaphor (1978), undoubtedly the most influential of her writings. Her precise delineation of the stereotypes and fantasies attached to illnesses—here, tuberculosis and cancer—played a major part in realizing her stated goal: “an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them.” The courage and clarity of her writing, her impatience with lazy assumptions and inherited biases, are evident on every page. This volume also includes six previously uncollected essays—studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon, and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement—along with a chronology of Sontag’s life and explanatory notes.
Author
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford. Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader. Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea. Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city. A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers. Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow. Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
