Among the literary stars of the radical 1960s, Susan Sontag (born 1933) produced numerous works evaluating and commenting on contemporary life and literature. Her essays appeared in nearly every major publication beginning in 1962, and her assessment...

Although Susan Sontag is best known as a critic, she has more than once expressed regret for having devoted so much time to having written the essays that brought her renown. As she once explained to reporter Leticia Kent, "a couple of things you do...

Susan Sontag, cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and filmmaker, was born 16 January 1933 in New York City. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California, and at the age of fifteen (1948) entered the University of California at Berkeley....

The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 12-30-2004 Susan Sontag Date: 12-30-2004, Thursday Section: OPINION Edtion: All Editions.=.Two Star B. Two Star P. One Star B Biographical: Susan Sontag Calling Susan Sontag a critic, essayist and novelist of enormous influence both belabors the...

In thinking of my mother now, more than a year after her death, I often find myself dwelling on that startling phrase in Auden's great memorial poem for Yeats-words that both sum up what small immortality artistic accomplishment sometimes can confer and are, simultaneously,...

At first glance, the cover of Susan Sontag’s final book—the almost-complete manuscript she left at her death in December 2004—seems antiseptic and ultra-modern, like an architectural photograph of the Düsseldorf School. Designed by Winterhouse, a small press run by her friend William Drenttel, it features...

SWIMMING IN A SEA OF DEATH By David Rieff Simon & Schuster, 179 pages, $21 There’s something obscene about sitting at a desk, in a chair that corrects the posture, sipping warm, sugary tea, yawning or scratching, barely aware of the fug of felt life,...

In the following interview, conducted in July, 1994, Sontag reveals the authors who have inspired and influenced her literary career, comments on the craft of writing, and elaborates on the different approaches she takes between writing essays and writing fiction.

In the following essay, Sayres examines both Sontag's fiction and her essays, focusing on her epigrammatic style, her multilayered studies into contradictions and negations, and modernist theories.

In the following essay, Kimball explores the inconsistencies he has found in several of Sontag's essays. Kimball argues against many of Sontag's conclusions, noting that she frequently contradicts herself in her own essays.