The Blog of Death

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag, an author and social critic, died on Dec. 28 from complications of acute myelogenous leukemia. She was 71.

Born Susan Rosenblatt in 1933, the New York native spent her early years in Tucson, Ariz., and Los Angeles. She skipped three grades and graduated from high school at 15. Although her mother warned that constant reading would keep men away, Sontag refused to heed this advice. The 17-year-old bibliophile was attending the University of Chicago when she sat in on a lecture by 28-year-old sociologist Philip Rieff. They were married 10 days later. The couple had a son, David, but divorced in the mid-1960s.

Sontag earned master's degrees in English and philosophy from Harvard University, studied in England and France, then moved to New York City. In 1964, she launched a career as a professional writer when she published the essay "Notes on Camp" in the Partisan Review. Sontag followed that up with critical studies and essay collections on disease ("Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors"), culture ("Where the Stress Falls") and still pictures ("On Photography").

Although "On Photography" received a National Book Critics Circle award in 1978, Sontag partially refuted her thesis (that photography had desensitized people from understanding true suffering) 25 years later in the essay collection, "Regarding the Pain of Others." She also wrote the introduction to "Women," a photography collection by her long-time companion Annie Leibovitz.

A self-described "obsessed moralist," Sontag actively campaigned for human rights and social equality. In the early 1990s, she called for the international community to respond to the genocide occurring in Rwanda and Bosnia. Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag sparked much debate when she bashed U.S. foreign policy and commented on the courage of the hijackers. In an essay published in The New Yorker, she wrote: "…Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

Sontag wrote "The Way We Live Now," an acclaimed short story about AIDS that later appeared in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century." She published a short story collection ("I, etcetera") and four novels, including the bestselling historical romance "The Volcano Lover." Her novel, "In America," which was loosely based on the life of Polish actress Helena Modjeska, won the National Book Award in 2000, but was criticized for using material from fiction and nonfiction sources without giving proper credit.

Sontag directed four feature-length films and penned the play "Alice in Bed." She received a MacArthur Genius grant and served two years as the president of the PEN American Center, an international writers' organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature. In 1989, Sontag defended author Salman Rushdie when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for writing "The Satanic Verses."

"Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles. She set a standard of intellectual rigor to which I and her many other admirers continue to aspire, insisting that with literary talent came an obligation to speak out on the great issues of the day, and above all to defend the sovereignty of the creative mind and imagination against every kind of tyranny," Rushdie stated.

• Listen to Several BBC Interviews With Sontag

• Listen to a Tribute From NPR

Posted on December 28, 2004 11:21 PM