susan sontag essays

Susan Sontag : Essays of the 1960s & 70s

“Susan Sontag’s essays are great interpretations, and even fulfillments, of what is really going on.”—Carlos Fuentes

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Pauline Kael’s I Lost it at the Movies (1965) marked the emergence of a major modern critic: fearless, impassioned, caustically funny, alert to the nuance of the smallest detail. “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” she observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker , Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation, enthralling readers with her gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace.

To read The Age of Movies is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. She was, in the words of editor Sanford Schwartz, “a romantic and a visionary” who “believed that movies could feed our imaginations in intimate and immediate—and liberating, even subversive—ways that literature and plays and other arts could not.” Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry.

Coming into her own as a writer during a time of cultural turmoil and remarkable cinematic accomplishment, she became one of the great chroniclers of that time and of the movies that were so central to it. Here are her appraisals of the films that defined an era—among them Breathless , Bonnie and Clyde , The Leopard , The Godfather , Last Tango in Paris , Nashville —along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

Sanford Schwartz , editor, writes for The New York Review of Books. His essays and reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers , and he is the author of critical biographies of the nineteenth-century Danish painter Christen Købke and the twentieth-century English artist William Nicholson. He and Pauline Kael were friends for many years.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.

“Pauline Kael commanded the American idiom. Her paragraphs announced their author. Like George Bernard Shaw, she wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humor, and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten.”—Roger Ebert

The quarter century after the end of World War II was a period of startling transformation in American art, signaled first by the triumph of abstraction and the ascendancy of painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, and then by the advent of Pop and Minimalism. The vitality of this creative explosion shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York and generated a body of writing of singular significance and style. In the words of editor Jed Perl, “there has never been a period when the visual arts have been written about with more mongrel energy—with more unexpected mixtures of reportage, rhapsody, analysis, advocacy, editorializing, and philosophy.”

In this Library of America volume, Perl, an acclaimed art critic and historian, gathers for the first time the most vibrant contemporary accounts of this momentous period—by artists, critics, poets, gallery owners, and other observers—conveying the sweep and energy of a cultural scene dominated (in the poet James Schuyler’s words) by “the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.”

This was a time when art mattered, and there was no lack of passionate, articulate voices to argue why and how. It was an age of contention and enthusiasm, when questions of style and representation, of commercialism and artistic rigor, were fundamental. Here are statements by the most significant painters, sculptors, and photographers—the diaries of Joseph Cornell and Charles Burchfield, the meditative essays of Jack Tworkov, the deadpan aphorisms of Andy Warhol, the manifestos of Marcel Duchamp and Ad Reinhardt—and major critical essays by Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Hilton Kramer, and other influential figures. Here too is an electrifying array of responses by poets and novelists, reflecting the interplay between different art forms: Susan Sontag on happenings, John Ashbery on Joan Mitchell, Frank O’Hara on David Smith, James Agee on Helen Levitt, James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney, Truman Capote on Richard Avedon, Tennessee Williams on Hans Hofmann, Ralph Ellison on Romare Bearden, Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank. The atmosphere of the time—from the Cedar Tavern to the Museum of Modern Art—comes to vivid life in memoirs, diaries, and journalistic reports by Peggy Guggenheim, Edwin Denby, Morton Feldman, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, Dwight Macdonald, Calvin Tomkins, and others.

Jed Perl weaves all this writing together with engaging headnotes that establish the historical background, sketch the outsized personalities of the artists and critics, and chart the battle lines of the aesthetic contests that defined the era. The result is an unprecedented cultural history told by those who made it, what Perl describes as “a magnificent, cacophonous sort of oratorio, with soloists and choir members agreeing about little except that the time has come for American art to take its place on the world stage.” It is a book that every art lover will treasure.

Jed Perl , editor, is the art critic for The New Republic . He is the author of New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century (2005), Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World (2008), Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture (2012), and other books. He teaches art history at The New School.

Art in America 1945–1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism is kept in print by a gift from the Towles family to the Guardians of American Letters Fund , made in memory of Stokely P. Towles.

“Jed Perl has compiled an invigorating panorama of art writing from a crucial quarter century, adding vital context with his incisive commentaries. As today’s art writers suffer diminishing visibility, the pleasure to be had exploring this collection comes as a salutary shock. An unexpectedly compulsive read.”—Elizabeth C. Baker, editor-at-large, Art in America magazine

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” These lines by Muriel Rukeyser epitomize the spirit that animated a whole generation of women poets, from the 1960s to the 1980s, who in exploring the unspoken truths of their lives sparked a literary revolution. Honor Moore’s anthology presents 58 poets whose work defines an era, among them Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sonia Sanchez, May Swenson, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Anne Waldman, Sharon Olds, Diane Di Prima, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. Here is a fresh and revelatory look at a crucial time in American poetry that presents the full range of its themes and approaches and a generous sampling of its most compelling voices.

Honor Moore is the author of the poetry collections Darling , Red Shoes , and Memoi , and she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the American Poets Project. She is the author most recently of the critically acclaimed memoir The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir.

About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

“In 1965, Sylvia Plath’s posthumous Ariel took the literary world by storm with its fierce and undeniably female voice. For the next 15 years, America saw a historic outpouring of women’s poetry supported by and supporting the women’s movement. As editor Moore points out, poetry was vital to the movement, articulating previously unexpressed lives, empowering others as the poets found their own power. . . . And all who missed these missiles and epistles then will find them still demanding and invigorating.”— Booklist (starred review)

In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the subterranean scenes and tribes that gave birth to cool: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices would merge and recombine in surprising ways, changing America forever.

To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O’Brien creates an unparalleled literary mixtape spanning decades of tumultuous and exuberant change. In the Forties, the era when the strands of hip begin to converge, Miles Davis joins Charlie Parker in a revolutionary musical collaboration that also signals a revolution in attitude; Henry Miller, back from Paris, dissects the grotesque hypocrisies of a Hollywood dinner party; and Beat avatar Neal Cassady writes to Jack Kerouac about his life on the road.

The Fifties sees the flowering of the Beats, in such voices as Kerouac, Diane di Prima, and Gregory Corso; Chandler Brossard and Terry Southern take sharp and satirical looks at the burgeoning hipster culture; Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl create a new outspoken form of stand-up comedy; and comedy maverick Del Close provides a glossary of “How to Talk Hip.” The cultural maelstrom of the Sixties and Seventies finds expression in the apocalyptic cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, the free-form fictions of Ishmael Reed and Richard Brautigan, and Andy Warhol’s reel-to-reel transcription of a speed-fueled night world. Bob Dylan recreates the Village folk scene, Ed Sanders celebrates poetic orgies, and Hunter S. Thompson plunges into the twisted heart of Las Vegas.

The Cool School tracks as well the succeeding generations of writers who have extended the terrain of their underground predecessors and continue to push against the enticements of mainstream America, including such contemporaries as Nick Tosches, Iris Owens, Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, and Eric Bogosian—all the way to a brilliant coda provided by the late George Carlin.

This one-of-a-kind anthology—“a possible textbook for Outlier Lit 101” in Glenn O’Brien’s words—recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous, unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.

Glenn O’Brien , editor, is the author of Soapbox , Human Nature (dub version) , and How To Be A Man . A former editor at Interview , Rolling Stone , Spin , and High Times , he writes frequently on contemporary art, supplied the lead catalog essay to the Whitney Museum exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–65,” and is a contributing editor at Ten , L’Officiel Hommes , and GQ , where he writes the “Style Guy” column.

“I first heard about the New York underground scene in the 1950s, and it seemed like a mysterious and thrilling way to live. To be an artist in the West Village became my dream. Reading Glenn’s collection has inspired me all over again.”—Deborah Harry

“Few cities,” writes Phillip Lopate in his introduction to this historic anthology, “have inspired as much great writing as New York.” Here, in a widely acclaimed volume, now updated and expanded, Lopate and The Library of America present an unprecedented literary portrait of the city as seen through the eyes of over a hundred writers from Washington Irving, the first New York author to establish an international reputation, to such contemporary voices as Jane Jacobs, Oscar Hijuelos, Louis Auchincloss, and Colson Whitehead. Residents and tourists, novelists and poets, architects, politicians, social reformers, sports writers, naturalists, humorists — in unexpected and dazzling ways, the writers in this volume take on the challenge of capturing New York’s enduring spirit, its constantly changing public spectacle, its gossip, amusements, and hard-luck stories, its tragedies and disasters.

From the beginning, writers recognized the city’s unique pace and variety, at once exhilarating and overwhelming. While Edgar Allan Poe complains of “the amount of general annoyances wrought by street-noises,” Walt Whitman strolls on Broadway to savor “the glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings.” Among the many moments from the city’s formative years, the diarist George Templeton Strong gives a first-hand account of the Draft Riots, Frederick Law Olmsted tells the inside story of the making of Central Park, and Fanny Fern investigates the hard life of New York’s working women. The modern city emerges in all its splendor and misery from the back alleys and opium dens to the inner precincts of Wall Street and Tammany Hall.

The 20th-century mix of voices mirrors New York’s ascendancy as the world capital of modernity. Theodore Dreiser meditates on the vanished pleasures of Manhattan Beach and William Carlos Williams serves a medical internship in Hell’s Kitchen; Kate Simon goes to the movies in the Bronx; Malcolm Cowley depicts Greenwich Village in its heyday; Edmund Wilson goes backstage at the Ziegfeld Follies and Elizabeth Hardwick encounters Billie Holiday; Zora Neale Hurston and Thomas Wolfe explore the argots of Harlem and Brooklyn; Edwin Denby remembers Willem de Kooning’s search for compositional beauty in the “spots and cracks” of the pavement; Allen Ginsberg gets mugged; and fellow poets Sara Teasdale, Charles Reznikoff, and Frank O’Hara finds touching resonance in the tiniest details of metropolitan life; Don DeLillo describes the terror of September 11th.

Extravagant in range, bursting with anecdote and observed detail, Writing New York is a book as full of life and surprise as the city itself.

Phillip Lopate , volume editor, is an essayist, novelist, and poet, whose books include Bachelorhood ; Against Joie de Vivre ; Portrait of My Body ; and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan . He has edited The Art of the Personal Essay and, for The Library of America, American Movie Critics: From the Silents Until Now . He is the Adams Professor of English at Hofstra University.

This deluxe paperback edition has been printed on acid-free paper.

Project support for this volume was provided by: Susan & Elihu Rose Foundation

“Rather like the city it pays tribute to, Writing New York is a touchstone, a monument [that] shows how profoundly New York has become a repository of the nation’s collective ambition and romantic vision of itself.”— The Dallas Morning News

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A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

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Susan Sontag

(1933-2004)

What Is Susan Sontag Known For?

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York City. In 1964, she gained recognition for her essay “Notes on Camp.” Sontag became widely known for her nonfiction works including Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), On Photography (1976) and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as for novels like The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), for which she won the National Book Award. Sontag died from cancer on December 28, 2004, in New York.

Early Life and Education

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York, New York to Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt, with the couple later having a second daughter, Judith. Sontag’s father was a fur trader, and her parents lived overseas for his business while Sontag lived with her grandparents in New York. Sontag's father died when she was still a child. Her mother moved the family to milder climates because of Sontag’s asthma and they eventually relocated ato California. In 1945, Mildred married Air Corps captain Nathan Sontag, from whom a pre-teen Sontag would take her surname.

Sontag became an avid reader and learner. She graduated high school at the age of 15 and attended the University of California at Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she met lecturer Philip Rieff. The two were married in less than two weeks after meeting and would have a son, David. Upon earning her bachelor’s in philosophy, Sontag went on to earn her master’s in English and philosophy at Harvard and did additional postgraduate work abroad at Oxford and the Sorbonne.

'Notes on Camp'

Sontag returned to the states by the late 1950s and opted to end her marriage with Rieff, moving to back to New York City with her son. She worked as a college instructor and began to make a name for herself as an essayist, writing for publications like The Nation and The New York Review of Books . A piece she wrote for The Parisian Review , “Notes on Camp,” earned her accolades. She had also been working on her debut novel, The Benefactor , released in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s publisher for the duration of her career.

As an intellectual and a woman in what was still too often a boys’ club, Sontag challenged traditional notions of how art should be interpreted and consumed and what cultural tropes could receive serious scrutiny. She was a renaissance soul as known for everything from collections of nonfiction prose like Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) and On Photography (1977) to fiction like I, etcetera: Stories (1978) and The Volcano Lover (1992). She also wrote and directed films, including Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Letter from Venice (1981).

National Book Award

Sontag was the source of much controversy throughout her career, with critics looking at everything from her political statements (i.e. she once offered words of support for communist governments, changing her stance later on) to the amount of attention she received from the general media.

Undeterred, Sontag continued to publish nonfiction works like Where the Stress Falls (2001) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), as well as the play Alice in Bed (1993) and the novel In America (2000), for which she won a National Book Award. (The writer/intellectual received an array of honors for her work.) Sontag also directed theater productions such as Samuel Beckett ’s Waiting for Godot in 1993 in Sarajevo during the region’s armed conflict.

Relationships, Illness and Death

Though Sontag took on sexuality-based cultural criticism, she was generally private about her affairs and enjoyed intimate relationships with women, including Eva Kollisch and photographer Annie Leibovitz , with whom she collaborated on the book Women (1999).

Sontag was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 1975. She detailed how myths around the disease can derail effective treatment in the book Illness as Metaphor (1978), later followed by another book about health and stigma, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989).

Sontag died from a form of leukemia on December 28, 2004, in New York City. Her son David, who went on to become an editor and a writer as well, paid tribute to Sontag in the book Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008).

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Susan Sontag
• Birth Year: 1933
• Birth date: January 16, 1933
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: New York City
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Susan Sontag was a critical essayist, cultural analyst, novelist and filmmaker. She wrote 'On Photography,' 'Illness as Metaphor,' 'The Volcano Lover' and 'In America,' among many other works.
• War and Militaries
• Education and Academia
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Politics and Government
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• The Sorbonne
• Oxford College
• University of Chicago
• Harvard University
• Nacionalities
• Occupations
• Anti-War Activist
• Death Year: 2004
• Death date: December 28, 2004
• Death State: New York
• Death City: New York City
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Susan Sontag Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/susan-sontag
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 26, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is the zone of freedom.
• I did have the idea that I’d like to have several lives, and it’s very hard to have several lives and then have a husband. … [S]omewhere along the line, one has to choose between the Life and the Project.
• If literature has engaged me as a project, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories of concern.
• It never occurred to me that I would want to marry someone who didn't like someone who read a lot of books.

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