Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an American writer, critic and public intellectual whose essays brought continental philosophical and aesthetic concerns to a wide readership in the United States. Born in New York City in 1933 and raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, she studied at Berkeley and Chicago and did graduate work at Harvard before turning to writing as her vocation. Her essay Notes on Camp made her famous in 1964, and Against Interpretation argued for an erotics of art attentive to form and immediate experience in place of a criticism that decodes works as messages. On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and Its Metaphors and Regarding the Pain of Others examined how images, illness and the picture of suffering shape moral and political life. She also wrote novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, and campaigned on political causes from Vietnam to Sarajevo. She was not an academic philosopher, and her work sits between criticism and philosophy. She died of leukemia in 2004.