Sontag is a writer of amazing range, writing on subjects from photography to politics to the my thology of illness. Though her first novel The Benefactor appeared in 1963, her role as an intellectual has always overshadowed her career as a fiction writer.

In the 1960s Sontag published two maverick works of art criticism, Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will. These works, as well as her 1977 On Photography, made her one of the most recognizable and controversial intellectuals in American public life.

As she was finishing On Photography Sontag was struck with near-fatal cancer, an experience that inspired her to write Illness as Metaphor, which examines the cultural symbolism surrounding cancer. This book won her a new audience and more critical esteem.

Began as a three-page epilogue to Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and Its Metaphors, became the subject of her next book. Having lost a very...