Susan Sontag's Legacy Examined 20 Years After Her Death
This year marks what would have been Susan Sontag's 91st birthday; she passed away in December 2004. Born in New York City in 1933, she pursued philosophy at Harvard before moving back to New York in 1956. In 1964, her essay 'Notes on "Camp"' published in Partisan Review took on the literary elite, followed by her 1966 compilation Against Interpretation. A pivotal trip to Hanoi in 1970 shaped her writing. Her 1977 work On Photography explored the intersection of art and suffering, while Illness as Metaphor (1978) examined disease imagery, notably omitting her 1975 cancer diagnosis. In 1993, she directed Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo. Benjamin Moser's biography from 2019 chronicles her ascent and complex persona. Her last publication, Regarding the Pain of Others, came out in 2003.
Key facts
- Susan Sontag died in December 2004
- She was born in 1933 in New York City
- Her essay 'Notes on "Camp"' was published in 1964 in Partisan Review
- She directed Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993 during the Bosnian war
- Illness as Metaphor was published in 1978
- On Photography was published in 1977
- Benjamin Moser's biography of Sontag won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019
- She studied philosophy at Harvard
Entities
Artists
- Susan Sontag
- Gary Indiana
- Sigrid Nunez
- Salman Rushdie
- Kierkegaard
- Nietzsche
- Dostoyevsky
- Kafka
- Baudelaire
- Rimbaud
- Genet
- Simone Weil
- Benjamin Moser
- Haris Pašović
- Samuel Beckett
- Hilton Kramer
Institutions
- Partisan Review
- PEN International
- MESS international theatre festival
- Esquire
- Harvard
- North Vietnamese government
- UN
Locations
- New York City
- United States
- Hanoi
- Vietnam
- Sarajevo
- Bosnia
- Paris
- France
- Switzerland