Carl Rollyson,Lisa Paddock

Susan Sontag

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This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933–2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of the influential writer’s life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag’s newly released private correspondence—including emails—and the letters and memoirs of those who knew her best. The authors reveal as never before her early years in Tucson and Los Angeles, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her longing for her absent father, and her precocious achievements at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Papers, diaries, and lecture notes, many accessible for the first time, spark a passionate fire in this biography.
The authors follow Sontag as she abruptly ends an early first marriage, establishes herself in Paris, and embraces the open lifestyle she began as a teenager in Berkeley. As a single mother she struggled with teaching at Columbia University and other colleges while aiming for a career as a novelist and essayist. Eventually she made her own way in New York City after acquiring her one and only publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
In her later years Sontag became a world figure, a tastemaker, dramatist, and political activist who risked her life in besieged Sarajevo. Love affairs with men and women troubled her. Diagnosed with cancer, she responded with determination, and her experience with illness inspired some of her best writing. This biography shows Sontag always craving “more life” at whatever cost and depicts her harrowing final decline even as she resisted terminal cancer. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated presents in candid and stark relief a new assessment of a heroic and controversial figure.
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560 printed pages
Original publication
2016
Publication year
2016
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Quotes

  • Fer Silvahas quoted7 years ago
    Photography—more than any other art—speaks to the human desire to acquire, to take command of the world, to exercise dominion over it.
  • Fer Silvahas quoted7 years ago
    But to Sontag the new sensibility was about precisely that ability to move between high and low, the so-called elite and popular or mass cultures of the day.
  • Fer Silvahas quoted7 years ago
    This fateful sentence is the first evidence that she would come to associate her own independence with the necessity of becoming cruel to anyone who claimed a part of her.
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