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January 16: Susan Sontag

lawrencebush
January 16, 2011

imagesEssayist, novelist, critic and philosopher Susan Sontag (Susan Rosenblatt) was born on this date in 1933 in New York City. She taught philosophy and theology at Sarah Lawrence, CUNY and Columbia before devoting herself to full-time writing in the early 1960s. Sontag’s best-known books include Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and In America, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2000. Sontag had love relationships with both men and women, including a decade-long romance with photographer Annie Liebovitz. She went to Hanoi during the Vietnam War; she lived in Sarajevo during the siege of that city; she helped rally American writers to Salman Rushdie’s cause when he was threatened by an Iranian fatwa; she was devoted to French intellectual culture and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris (she died at 71 in 2004).

“What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.” —Susan Sontag