Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Susan's Work
Susan Sontag was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, and a film and theater director.
As a fiction writer, Sontag published the novels The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), The Volcano Lover (1992), In America: A Novel (2000); a volume of short fiction, I, etcetera (1973), and a story, The Way We Live Now (1991). She also wrote and directed several plays, including Alice in Bed (1990). As an essayist, Sontag contributed in a number of areas of aesthetic and cultural criticism. Her collections include Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), among others. She edited the writings of Antonin Artaud and Roland Barthes for English-language readers. As a filmmaker, she wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), Promised Lands (1974), and Unguided Tour (1983).
Biography
Sontag was president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization (1987-89). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1979) and was named a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1999), among many other awards.
Sontag received a B.A. (1951) from the University of Chicago and an M.A. (1954 and 1955) from Harvard University.
Last updated January 1, 2005
Published on August 1, 1990
