Writer and critic Susan Sontag dies at 71
Susan Sontag, arguably one of America's most influential intellectuals of the last 50 years, has died in New York.
Sontag died early Tuesday morning, Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced, without giving a cause of death. She was 71 years old.
Her son and editor David Rieff told the New York Times the cause was complications of acute myeloginous leukemia. Sontag had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1970s and was recently reported to be suffering from leukemia.
The author, a self-proclaimed "besotted aesthete," "obsessed moralist," and "zealot of seriousness," had a voracious mind and was prodigiously productive in a variety of art forms. Her main literary concern was to understand, through culture, the modern human condition.
Sontag was also a lifelong social critic, political and human rights activist. She chaired the American branch of PEN, the international writers' organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature from 1987 to 1989.
During this time she fought on behalf of persecuted writers around the world, including Salman Rushdie, in hiding from Iranian death threats over an allegedly blasphemous novel.
"She was a true friend in need," Rushdie said Tuesday. "Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles."
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Best known for her critical essays
Sontag was best known for her clear but passionate, always stimulating and sometimes scathingly critical writing. It covered a wide range of subject matter.
Her breakthrough 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, examined the "so bad it's good" attitude towards popular culture. Her fight with cancer informed her 1978 study, Illness as Metaphor.
Among her other best-known works of analytical non-fiction are On Photography(1977), and Against Interpretation (1966), in which she argued that critical analysis interfered with the "incantatory, magical" power of art.
Her widely-translated books include the not uniformly well-received historical novels The Volcano Lover (1992), about Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton, and In America(2000), about 19th-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska.
Sontag won the the U.S. National Book Award for the latter despite an uproar over claims she had plagiarised parts of the work.
Stories and essays by Sontag have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.
Sontag also made films and theatre, including a 1993 staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, of which she was made an honorary citizen. She spent intermittent periods in the war-torn capital of Bosnia between 1993 and 1996, seeking to attract attention the renewed eruption of barbarism in Europe.
Took controversial political stances
As a political activist, her impassioned critiques often got her into trouble. Her positions sometimes garnered more approval abroad than at home in America â as when she opposed the U.S. military campaign against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, for example.
Days after the attacks she wrote in the New Yorker: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a `cowardly' attack on `civilization' or `liberty' or `humanity' or `the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?"
Sontag received many honours abroad, including most recently, the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1999, the French government named her a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Studied philosophy, literature and theology
Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt into a well-off Jewish family in New York City in January 1933; grew up in Tucson, Ariz. where the family moved after her father's death while trading furs in China; and, attended high school in Los Angeles where her mother was remarried to Nathan Sontag.
She finished high school at 15, received her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1951, and completed master's degrees in English and Philosophy at Harvard. She never completed her doctorate in Philosophy.
She married Philipp Rieff, a social psychologist and historian, 10 days after meeting him in Chicago in 1950. The couple had one child, David, in 1952, and divorced in 1958.
She said of Rieff, "he was passionate, he was bookish, he was pure."
Sontag is believed to have been the close companion of American photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom she collaborated on the book Women (1999) for over a decade, but she never publicly talked about their relationship.