Biography: Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford.

Her books, all published by FSG, include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and eight works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, and Regarding the Pain of Others. In 1982, FSG published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, Granta, and many other magazines here and abroad. Her much anthologized story "The Way We Live Now" (1987) was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties and, more recently, in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.

Her books are translated into thirty-two languages.

Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden (whose screenplays were published by FSG); Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had many productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. A more recent play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Korea.

Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe; her most recent theatre work was a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers' organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.

Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.

Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

Additional Information About Susan Sontag:
Susan Sontag's Official Site
The New York Review of Books
Susan Sontag: Remebering an Intellectual Heroine

(2004). Susan Sontag. Retrieved May 7, 2005 from http://www.susansontag.com/biography.htm.