A short life of the author
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was born Susan Rosenblatt on 16 January 1933 in New York City. She graduated from high school at fifteen, attended the University of Chicago at sixteen, and later studied at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne.
Life and Career
Against Interpretation (1966) — her first essay collection, including the title essay’s famous argument that interpretation is “the revenge of the intellect upon art” and “Notes on ‘Camp’” — established her as the most important American cultural critic of her generation.
On Photography (1977) — a meditation on the meaning and ethics of photography — won the National Book Critics Circle Award and remains the essential text on the subject. Illness as Metaphor (1978) — written while she was being treated for breast cancer — argues that the metaphors attached to illness (cancer as invasion, AIDS as plague) harm patients by adding moral and psychological burdens to physical suffering.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) — about the ethics of looking at images of suffering — was her last major nonfiction work. Her fiction — including The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000, National Book Award) — is less celebrated but substantial.
Major Works and Themes
Sontag wrote about aesthetics, ethics, photography, illness, war, and the relationship between art and morality. She was one of the last American intellectuals who could command a broad public audience.
Key Works
- Against Interpretation (1966)
- On Photography (1977)
Collecting Sontag
Against Interpretation first edition (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $200–$600. On Photography (FSG, 1977) brings $100–$300. Sontag died in 2004.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Against Interpretation Sontag's first essay collection — the book that made her famous — argues for an 'erotics of art' over hermeneutics, champions the sensuous immediacy of form against the reflexive demand for content and meaning, and defines the sensibility she called 'Camp' in what remains one of the most influential works of American cultural criticism. | 1966 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | English |
| Illness as Metaphor Written while Sontag was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, this extended essay examines how diseases — tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, cancer in the twentieth — acquire metaphorical meanings that add suffering to illness by implying moral responsibility, arguing that the most truthful way of regarding illness is one purified of metaphoric thinking. | 1978 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | English |
| On Photography Six interconnected essays examining photography's power to shape perception — arguing that cameras have become instruments of aggression and appropriation, that photographic images aestheticize suffering and flatten reality, and that the accumulation of images has fundamentally altered human consciousness in ways both liberating and predatory. | 1977 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | English |
| Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag's final major essay — a reconsideration and partial retraction of On Photography — examines how images of war and atrocity function, arguing against the thesis that photography numbs viewers through overexposure and insisting instead that certain images retain their power to shock, that compassion fatigue is a moral choice not an inevitable consequence of viewing, and that our inability to fully comprehend others' suffering is not a failure of images but a condition of existence. | 2003 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | English |
| Styles of Radical Will Sontag's second essay collection — more radical than Against Interpretation — includes 'The Aesthetics of Silence,' her analysis of pornographic literature, her controversial 'Trip to Hanoi,' and extended studies of Bergman and Godard, pushing further into the territory where aesthetics becomes ethics and art's refusal to communicate becomes its most political act. | 1969 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | English |