Susan Sontag

Born Susan Lee Rosenblatt on January 16, 1933, in New York City, and raised in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles by her mother after her father, a fur trader, died of tuberculosis in China when she was five. She took the surname Sontag from her stepfather. A prodigy who entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, she earned degrees from Harvard and studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne. At seventeen she married the sociologist Philip Rieff; they had a son, David, and divorced in 1959. Her essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), published in Partisan Review, made her famous overnight as the most glamorous and formidable intellectual in America. Against Interpretation (1966) challenged the dominance of content-based criticism and argued for an "erotics of art." On Photography (1977) explored how the camera mediates and distorts reality. Illness as Metaphor (1978), written after her own diagnosis of breast cancer, dismantled the moralistic language that surrounds disease. She traveled to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, directed a production of Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo in 1993, and wrote with equal authority about literature, film, photography, and politics. Her novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999) showed a different side of her ambition; the latter won the National Book Award. She survived two bouts of cancer before succumbing to myelodysplastic syndrome on December 28, 2004, in New York, at seventy-one.

In the summer of 1993, with Sarajevo under siege and snipers ringing the hills above it, Sontag staged Waiting for Godot in a theatre without electricity. The actors, three pairs playing Vladimir and Estragon, performed only the first act by candlelight, to an audience that had crossed shelled streets to be there.