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THE EARLY LIFE OF SUSAN SONTAG
Susan Sontag (born Susan Rosenblatt) was born on
January 16, 1933, in New York City to a Jewish family. Her childhood was far
from idyllic. Her father, Jack Rosenblatt, a fur trader in China, died of
tuberculosis when Susan was only five years old. Her mother, Mildred—whom
Sontag would later describe as an emotionally distant, "narcissistic
beauty" struggling with alcoholism—hid the father’s death from her
daughter for two years. Eventually, Mildred married Nathan Sontag; though he
never officially adopted Susan, she took his surname as her own.
Sontag’s early adolescence was spent in Arizona and
California, where the family moved to alleviate her asthma. There, she felt
like an intellectual exile among her peers. While other children played
outside, Susan was obsessed with classical literature, devouring the works of
Kant, Kafka, and Mann. She described herself as a "self-constructed
person," seeking refuge in books from the pervasive emptiness and boredom
of her home environment.
At just 15, Sontag graduated high school and enrolled
at Berkeley. Her stay was brief, however, as she was soon lured by the
intellectual prestige of the University of Chicago. This period proved to be a
time of radical transformation. In Chicago, she found her true element—a world
where ideas mattered more than the mundane details of daily life. It was here
that she began to forge her unique, uncompromising style of thought that would
later establish her as one of the most influential critics of the 20th century.
In a shocking and incredibly swift turn of events,
Sontag married at the age of 17. After a courtship of only ten days, she wed
her instructor, the sociologist Philip Rieff. To observers, the decision seemed
like an intellectual impulse or a desperate attempt to escape her mother’s
control. By 19, Susan was mother to a son, David; however, neither motherhood
nor the traditional role of a wife could dampen her insatiable hunger for
knowledge and ambition.
During her university years, Sontag underwent an
intense internal shift regarding her sexuality. Despite being married to a man,
she experienced formative relationships with women that reshaped her worldview.
Her first serious same-sex experience at Berkeley with Harriet Zwerling opened
her eyes to her own duality. In her journals, she wrote of "liberation
from the prison of the body," even as she maintained the public image of
an exemplary academic wife.
After moving to Europe to study at Oxford and Paris,
Sontag finally realized that her marriage was suffocating her. In Paris, she
immersed herself in bohemian life, discovering the philosophical movements,
cinema, and intellectuals that would define her aesthetic taste. It was during
this time that she decided to break from Rieff and return to New York with her
son and only seven dollars in her pocket, determined to become a writer in her
own right rather than remain in the shadow of an academic husband.
By the late 1950s, back in New York, she had become a
prominent fixture of the "New York Intellectuals." She worked as an
editor, taught the history of religion at Columbia University, and wrote
feverishly. At the time, she was known as a formidable, erudite woman who was
unafraid to provoke and question established norms in both art and morality.
This intense formative stage culminated in 1963 with
the publication of her debut novel, The Benefactor. Although the book received
mixed reviews, it marked Sontag’s official entry into the upper echelons of the
literary world. It was the end of a long journey—from a lonely girl in the
Arizona desert to a woman who would soon redefine our understanding of modern
culture and "Camp."
THE RISE OF THE CRITIC: SUSAN SONTAG AS AN
INTELLECTUAL ICON
Following the release of The Benefactor, Susan Sontag
rapidly became an icon of the New York intelligentsia, her influence reaching
far beyond literature. She was not merely a writer; she was an
"intellectual star"—a woman capable of bridging the gap between high
and popular culture, analyzing everything from French New Wave cinema to high
fashion. Her status was cemented in 1966 with the essay collection Against
Interpretation, in which she challenged traditional modes of art criticism. She
argued that the sensory experience and aesthetics of a work were more vital
than the search for its "meaning." Sontag became the arbiter of
modernity, possessing a sharp gaze and a gift for theorizing "Camp"
that earned her an authority both feared and admired by the academic world.
Her personality was a complex, often intimidating
blend: she possessed incredible erudition and an uncompromising seriousness,
coupled with a significant streak of narcissism. Known for being as demanding
of others as she was of herself, she often left interlocutors feeling
intellectually inferior. Her character was defined by a constant hunger for new
experiences—she read thousands of books, attended every major premiere, and
felt a duty to be at the center of the world's most significant events. Sontag
was a woman who branded herself; her jet-black hair with its single shock of
white became a symbol of intellectual authority, and her public persona
radiated a cold yet magnetic power.
Sontag’s private life was a perpetual struggle between
a need for intimacy and a desire for absolute independence. Her sexuality did
not fit easily into any box; though she had several significant relationships
with men, she spent the majority of her life with women. However, she avoided
publicly declaring her homosexuality for a long time, fearing it would
oversimplify her image as a thinker. Her long-term relationships—with artist
Nicole Stéphane, choreographer Lucinda Childs, and finally, the famed photographer
Annie Leibovitz—were intellectually stimulating but often fraught with tension,
as Sontag invariably prioritized her work and the needs of her own ego.
Her relationship with her only son, David Rieff, was
one of the most complicated threads of her life. Sontag loved him with a
certain possessiveness, treating him more as an intellectual partner or comrade
than a child in need of nurturing. David became her editor and companion at a
young age, and their bond was symbiotic—simultaneously nourishing and
suffocating. Growing up among books and debates, he later described his mother
in his memoirs as a person for whom life was a text, and for whom real feelings
often took a backseat to grand ideas. In Sontag’s view, "family life"
as a domestic ideal did not exist; she created no cozy home, residing instead
within her library and the hotels she visited during her world travels.
A vivid and shocking chapter of Sontag’s life began in
1975 when she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Doctors predicted she
had only a few months to live, yet her legendary stubbornness prevailed.
Refusing to accept death as a certainty, she approached her illness as another
intellectual project. Believing that knowledge and science were the only paths
to salvation, she studied medical literature herself, sought out the most
aggressive treatments, and underwent an experimental chemotherapy regimen in
France so intense that many patients could not endure it.
This experience became the foundation for one of her
most vital works, Illness as Metaphor (1978). In this book, Sontag fiercely
criticized the then-popular notion that diseases—cancer in particular—were
caused by psychological issues or a "bad attitude." She fought
against the idea that a patient is responsible for their own illness, arguing
that metaphors only hinder the healing process. To her, cancer was a biological
fact to be destroyed by chemistry, not a spiritual punishment. It was her way
of restoring dignity to patients who felt guilty for their condition. She
survived and lived actively for decades, even as illness continued to lurk in
the shadows.
By the 1980s, Sontag had become an active political
warrior, her courage reaching its peak during the Siege of Sarajevo. While the
city was under fire, she traveled there to stage Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot. To many of her Western colleagues, it was a shocking act—sitting in
basements by candlelight, rehearsing theater with people facing death daily.
Sontag saw it as a moral duty, believing that culture was the only thing
capable of maintaining human dignity in the face of barbarism. Her presence in
Sarajevo was no mere posture; it was a sincere devotion that eventually earned
her honorary citizenship of the city.
In her later years, Sontag produced her most mature
works of fiction, including the novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America
(1999), the latter of which won the National Book Award. Though she always
considered herself a novelist first, the world continued to value her most as a
brilliant essayist. Her self-perception did not soften with age; she remained a
woman who might abruptly end an interview if a question struck her as too
banal. She felt a constant shortage of time, striving to read every new book
and see every important film, as if running from an ultimate diagnosis.
Cancer struck a second time (this time uterine) in the
late 1990s, yet Sontag again demonstrated an iron will, surviving a complex
surgery and grueling treatment without losing her capacity for work. Her final
major book of essays, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), returned to the
theme of suffering, analyzing how we consume images of war and violence. It was
a farewell to a world in which she had spent her life trying to be a vigilant
witness. Sontag loathed weakness and the physical changes brought by illness,
fighting for her appearance and intellectual sharpness until the very end.
Ultimately, in 2004, she was diagnosed with
myelodysplastic syndrome, which evolved into acute leukemia—a consequence of
the aggressive cancer treatments that had saved her life decades earlier. Her
final days in a New York hospital were both tragic and grand. Even as she lay
dying, she demanded that the news be read to her and grew angry with her son
when he attempted to allude to the approaching end. She passed away on December
28, 2004, at the age of 71. Sontag’s legacy is not just a mountain of books, but
the example of an intellectual who turned her life into a continuous,
uncompromising act of thought, never allowing herself the luxury of being
superficial.
ILLNESS AS METAPHOR (1978)
Illness as Metaphor (1978) emerged from Sontag’s
personal battle with stage IV breast cancer. During her treatment, she observed
that patients suffered not only from physical pain but also from a heavy
cultural burden—the metaphors society wraps around severe illnesses. Sontag’s
goal was to demythologize illness and liberate the patient from the moral
weight imposed by language. She argued that illness is not a spiritual
punishment or a character flaw, but a biological process that should be treated
with medicine, not interpretation.
The primary target of her essay was the notion that
cancer is caused by emotional repression or a "cancerous
personality." Sontag sharply criticized popular psychological theories of
the time that suggested people "become their own disease" or that a
failure to express feelings manifests as a tumor. In her view, such theories
only further traumatized the patient by making them responsible for their own
cellular mutation. She demanded that cancer be viewed without any mysticism—as
a mechanical failure to be addressed by doctors, not by clergy or therapists.
Sontag compared cancer to tuberculosis (TB), which in
the 19th century was romanticized as a disease of "spiritual" and
"artistic" types, lending a certain fragility and beauty to the
sufferer. In contrast, 20th-century cancer became a symbol of shame and fear,
associated with invasion, decay, and a death sentence. Sontag pointed out that
military terminology—the "war on cancer," "cellular
invasion," the "chemotherapy arsenal"—creates a paranoiac
environment where the patient feels like a battlefield rather than a human
being in need of rational care.
The book also analyzes how disease is used as a
political tool. Sontag noted that the term "cancer" is often invoked
to describe perceived social evils: corruption, ideological enemies, or social
decay. Such language not only demonizes the disease but renders it taboo. She
argued that as long as illness is used as a metaphor for something repulsive,
actual patients will continue to feel stigmatized and isolated from the
"kingdom of the well." Illness as Metaphor became a revolutionary
text in medical ethics and the humanities, successfully shifting the Western
perspective toward empathy and rationality.
AGAINST INTERPRETATION AND OTHER ESSAYS
(1966)
The publication of Against Interpretation and Other
Essays (1966) was the turning point that transformed Susan Sontag from an
author into an intellectual phenomenon. This text served as a manifesto for the
1960s cultural revolution, shaking the foundations of traditional art
appreciation. Sontag’s central thesis was radical and, at the time, shocking:
that art criticism, in its attempt to find "hidden meaning"
everywhere, actually poisons art and distances us from the direct experience of
it.
Sontag argued that modern interpretation is "the
revenge of the intellect upon art." According to her, critics had become
like translators who treat a work of art as a mere coded message to be
deciphered. She criticized Marxist and Freudian approaches for reducing
paintings or films to political or sexual symbols. She argued that this
obsession with content kills the sensuality of a work—we stop seeing the
colors, hearing the sounds, or feeling the form because we are too hurried to
answer the question, "What does it mean?"
One of the most famous lines from the collection is:
"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." With this
cry, Sontag invited us to reclaim the sharpness of our senses. She urged
critics not to explain what a work says, but to describe how it works and how
it is. In her view, the modern person is so saturated with information that
their senses have become numbed; the purpose of art is to awaken those senses,
and the duty of criticism is to facilitate that awakening rather than obscure
the work with dry theory.
The collection also featured the seminal essay
"Notes on 'Camp,'" which for the first time intellectually validated
kitsch, extravagance, and artifice. Sontag analyzed an aesthetic that revels in
"excess" and "bad taste," transforming it into a legitimate
art form. She boldly juxtaposed high culture (such as Bellini’s operas) with
popular culture (comic books or pop music), asserting that
"seriousness" was no longer the sole criterion for valuing art. This
was a massive step toward postmodernism, where the boundaries between the
"elite" and the "masses" began to dissolve.
THE OTHER SIDE OF SUSAN SONTAG
Behind her stern public image lay a life defined by
radical habits and personal dramas that bordered on the extreme. Her incredible
productivity and sharp writing style had a darker engine: during the 1960s, she
was a heavy user of amphetamines. This allowed her to stay awake for days at a
time, devouring books and writing without pause, but it also fueled a
persistent paranoia and emotional instability that bled into her personal
relationships.
This uncompromising relationship with the intellect
was evident as early as her marriage to Philip Rieff. Evidence suggests that
Sontag effectively wrote the majority of Rieff’s most famous book on Freud.
Following their divorce, a shocking "intellectual bargain" took
place: Susan agreed to surrender her authorship rights and remove her name from
the book’s cover in exchange for Rieff not contesting the custody of their son.
She quite literally sacrificed her early genius for personal freedom.
Sontag’s domestic life in New York was a form of
controlled catastrophe. Though she was a fashion icon, her home was a chaotic
landscape of book piles and cigarette smoke. Her library of 15,000 volumes,
meticulously organized by theme and chronology, was her "hallucination
machine." She would fly into a rage if anyone moved a book by a single
millimeter, yet she was famously indifferent to food or domestic order,
focusing all her energy on an image centered around that iconic white streak in
her hair.
Her private emotional life was darker than her public
persona suggested. Posthumously published journals revealed a need for
intellectual and emotional domination, and her relationships with women were
often marked by a certain cruelty and power play. Sontag felt a constant
conflict between the powerful authority she performed for the world and a deep
sense of inadequacy in her private life, where love was often synonymous with
painful intensity.
Sontag was also famous for a staggering intellectual
snobbery—she could be demonstratively rude to those she deemed
"uninteresting"—yet she maintained a childlike weakness for pop
culture icons. She adored Patti Smith, spent time with Andy Warhol, and could
bridge Heideggerian philosophy and rock music in a single sentence. This
appalled dry academics, but for her, it was proof that the high intellect knows
no borders if the object of study is sufficiently "Camp" or
authentic.
The final, and perhaps most public, scandal of her
life occurred posthumously through the lens of Annie Leibovitz. Despite their
fifteen-year relationship, Sontag never allowed Leibovitz to call her a partner
in public. After Sontag’s death, Leibovitz photographed her body in the morgue.
This image—the dead intellectual with her famous white lock—was published in a
photography book, sparking an international outcry. Her son David Rieff called
it a "visual necrophilia," yet it served as the final, shocking point
of Sontag’s life, where personal intimacy and public art collided in the most
brutal fashion.
A Rebellious Soul
