Susan Lee Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York City, to Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jewish Americans of Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her father managed a fur trading business in Tientsin, China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Her mother subsequently married US Army Captain Nathan Sontag, and Susan and her sister Judith took their stepfather's surname, though he did not formally adopt them. The childhood Sontag described in later years was deeply unhappy — her mother was cold, alcoholic, and frequently absent. The family lived on Long Island, then in Tucson, Arizona, then in the San Fernando Valley in southern California, and throughout this peripatetic, loveless upbringing, Sontag took refuge in books with an intensity that would define the rest of her life.
She graduated from North Hollywood High School at the astonishing age of fifteen and began undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago, drawn by admiration for its demanding core curriculum. At Chicago she studied philosophy, ancient history, and literature, studying under an extraordinary faculty that included Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Richard McKeon, and Kenneth Burke, among others. She graduated at eighteen with an A.B. and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society. Her undergraduate work had first appeared in print in 1951, in the winter issue of the Chicago Review, when she was seventeen. Also at Chicago she married Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor, after a courtship of just ten days. She was seventeen; the marriage would last eight years, and the couple had a son, David Rieff, who later became his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and a writer in his own right.
From Chicago, Sontag moved to Harvard University for graduate study, first in literature under Perry Miller and Harry Levin and then in philosophy and theology under Paul Tillich, Jacob Taubes, and others. She earned a Master of Arts in philosophy and began doctoral research encompassing metaphysics, ethics, Greek philosophy, Continental philosophy, and theology. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived for a year with Sontag and Rieff while working on his 1955 book Eros and Civilization — a proximity to intellectual life of the highest order that was entirely typical of Sontag's formative years. She also contributed so substantially to Rieff's 1959 study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist — research she conducted after David's birth — that her later biographer Benjamin Moser argued she was effectively the true author of the text. The authorship of that book became, in the context of their separation, part of the settlement between them.
After teaching freshman English at the University of Connecticut for the 1952-53 academic year, Sontag eventually relocated to New York City, the intellectual arena best suited to her ambitions. In 1964, she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'" in Partisan Review, a dazzling analysis of a sensibility — the love of the artificial, the exaggerated, the stylized — that no critic had previously examined with such precision. The essay made her famous almost overnight in New York intellectual circles and established the analytical voice she would refine over four decades: erudite, aphoristic, willing to take seriously what the academy dismissed, and never condescending to the reader.
Her subsequent essay collections cemented her reputation. Against Interpretation (1966) argued against the prevailing critical tendency to reduce art to its content, insisting on attention to form, style, and sensory experience. On Photography (1977) examined the ways in which photography had transformed modern consciousness and our relationship to reality — a subject that became more rather than less relevant with every passing decade of the image-saturated twentieth century. Illness as Metaphor (1978), written partly out of her own experience with cancer, dissected the ways in which society projected moral meaning onto illness, particularly tuberculosis and cancer, blaming patients for their conditions in ways that compounded suffering. Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), published near the end of her life, returned to the intersection of images and violence, examining what photographs of war do and do not communicate, and the ethical complexities of bearing witness.
Beyond essays, Sontag wrote fiction throughout her career. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" (1986), published in The New Yorker, addressed the AIDS crisis through the prism of a man's illness and the responses of his social circle, and became one of the defining literary responses to that epidemic. Her novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999) demonstrated an ambition that ranged beyond the analytical essay into historical and imaginative territory. She was also a stage director and a playwright. She traveled to war zones — during the Vietnam War and during the Siege of Sarajevo, where she staged Waiting for Godot in besieged conditions — and her speeches on American foreign policy, particularly after the September 11 attacks, drew fierce criticism from those who considered them insufficiently patriotic.
Sontag died on December 28, 2004, in New York City, of myelodysplastic syndrome, at the age of seventy-one. She had been ill more than once over the decades and had written about illness with unique authority. She has been called one of the most influential critics of her generation — a description that understates the breadth of her engagement with literature, cinema, photography, politics, theater, and the nature of intellectual life itself.
