Sontag, << SON tahg, >> Susan (1933-2004), was an American essayist and novelist. Her works strongly influenced experimental art during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Sontag is perhaps best known for a collection of essays called Against Interpretation (1966). In these essays, she argued that people should experience art with their emotions and senses, rather than analyze it intellectually. Her essay collection Styles of Radical Will (1969) deals with the effects of drugs and pornography on art. In Illness as Metaphor (1978), Sontag examines how different illnesses generate cultural metaphors. Her essays on alienation and photography appear in On Photography (1978). Essays on literature and film were published in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980). She provided cultural analysis in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989). In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag discusses the impact of images of violence on modern society. She expressed her disillusion with modern American society in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, published in 2007, after her death. Two volumes of her private journals were published as Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 (2008) and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980 (2012). The Library of America published Essays of the 1960s and 70s (2013) and Later Essays (2017).
Sontag’s novels The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) deal with characters who are separated from reality because they cannot distinguish between it and their dream worlds. The Volcano Lover (1992) is a historical work about the famous British admiral Horatio Nelson and his lover, Emma Hamilton. In America (2000) describes the adventures of a Polish actress in California in the late 1800’s. Sontag’s short stories were collected in I, etcetera (1978) and Debriefing (2017). She was born on Jan. 16, 1933, in New York City and died there on Dec. 28, 2004.
