The Life and Legacy of Susan Sontag Sarah Warn, December 30,
2004
When
acclaimed and controversial bisexual writer Susan Sontag
died this week at the age of 71 from complications of acute
myelogenous leukemia, she left behind a legacy of work that
makes her one of the most influential--and controversial--social
critics of the last 50 years.
A fixture in New York as an adult, Sontag was born in New York
City in 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.
Sontag
met and married Philip Rieff at the age of 17, and together
they had a son, then divorced eight years later (in 1958). She
had multiple relationships in the years following, including
several with women, and there rumors persisted for years about
a long-term romance between Sontag and photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Sontag
broke out of the literary pack in 1964 at the age of
31 with her essay "Notes on Camp," which addressed
the concept of "camp" for the first time:
A
sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest
things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp,
in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural
mode of sensibility, if there be any such. The essence of Camp
is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.
And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge
of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy
two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World
in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print.
To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.
But
talk about it she did, and she soon got everyone else talking
about it, too. She has since been credited as the one who defined
the "so bad it's good" concept that is now so prevalent
among gay and straight American culture.
Sontag
went onto write other nonfiction works that had considerable
influence, includingIllness
as Metaphor in 1978, which was described by Newsweek
as "one of the most liberating books of its time" for
its argument that metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses,
especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and
often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. She later wrote
AIDS as Metaphor as a follow-up work specifically about
the AIDS crisis.
Over
the course of her life, Sontag published eight nonfiction books,
a collection of short stories, and four plays, and four novels
(including The Volcano Lover and In America).
Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages, and
her play Alice in Bed has been produced in the United
States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland.
She
won numerous awards over the years, including the National Book
Critics Circle Award for On Photography in 1978, the
National Book Award for In America in 2000, the Jerusalem
Prize in 2001, and in 2003, the Peace Prize of the German Book
Trade and the Prince of Asturias Award on Literature.
