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. She transferred after a year to the University of Chicago, where in 1950 she met and subsequently married Philip Rieff, a social psychologist, with whom she had a son in 1952. In 1951 she took her B.A. in philosophy and continued her studies at Harvard, where she took an M.A. in English in 1954, an M.A. in philosophy in 1955, and was a Ph.D. candidate from 1955-1957. In 1957 she attended St. Anne's College, Oxford, to pursue graduate study, and in 1957-1958 she studied at the University of Paris on a grant from the American Association of University Women. After her divorce in 1959, Sontag spent a brief time as an editor at Commentary and then resumed her academic interests as a lecturer in philosophy at the City College of New York and Sarah Lawrence.
