Susan Sontag

One of the great American public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is known for her insightful and cutting edge essays, such as "Notes on Camp" (1964) and "Fascinating Fascism" (1974). In the wake of her own experience with cancer, she wrote a stunning analysis of medical discourses in Illness as Metaphor (1978); she followed this up with an analysis of the discourses surrounding AIDS in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989). She was also a novelist, known best for The Volcano Lover. Recently the publication of her diaries has begun--in which we learn just how smart she was--at age 16!

Born in New York, Sontag grew up in Tucson Arizona. She started college at Berkeley (where she had a number of tumultuous lesbian affairs) and then transferred to the University of Chicago, where--after a ten-day courtship(!)--she married her professor Philip Rieff (who you may know as the editor of a number of important English-language Freud editions, such as Dora). They had a baby, David, who is her editor and a writer in his own right. Philip took the family to Brandeis--Susan hated it there! They divorced fairly quickly. At the end of her life, Susan was partners with the famed photographer Annie Liebovitz.