Susan Sontag - Life

Life

Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, the daughter of Mildred (née Jacobson) and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jewish. Her father managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Seven years later, her mother married Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister, Judith, were given their stepfather's surname, although he never adopted them formally. Sontag did not have a religious upbringing. She claimed not to have entered a synagogue until her mid-twenties.

Sontag grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and, later, in Los Angeles, where she graduated from North Hollywood High School at the age of 15. She began her undergraduate studies at Berkeley but transferred to the University of Chicago in admiration of its famed core curriculum. At Chicago, she undertook studies in philosophy, ancient history and literature alongside her other requirements (Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, Peter von Blanckenhagen and Kenneth Burke were among her lecturers) and graduated with an A.B. Upon completing her Chicago degree, Sontag taught freshman English at the University of Connecticut for the 1951-52 academic year. She attended Harvard University for graduate school, initially studying literature with Perry Miller before moving into philosophy and theology under Paul Tillich, Jacob Taubes, Raphael Demos and Morton White et al. After completing her master of arts in philosophy and beginning doctoral research into metaphysics, ethics, Greek philosophy and Continental philosophy and theology at Harvard, Sontag was awarded an American Association of University Women's fellowship for the 1957-1958 academic year to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she had classes with Iris Murdoch, J. L. Austin, Stuart Hampshire and others. Oxford did not appeal to her, however, and she transferred after Michaelmas term of 1957 to the University of Paris. It was in Paris that Sontag socialized with expatriate artists and academics including Allan Bloom, Jean Wahl, Alfred Chester, Harriet Sohmers and Maria Irene Fornes. Sontag remarked that her time in Paris was, perhaps, the most important period of her life. It certainly provided the basis of her long intellectual and artistic association with the culture of France.

At 17, while at Chicago, Sontag married Philip Rieff after a ten-day courtship. She researched and contributed to Rieff's 1959 study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist prior to their divorce in 1958. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rieff for a year while working on his book Eros and Civilization. Sontag and Rieff were married for eight years. The couple had a son, David Rieff, who later became his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a writer.

The publication of Against Interpretation (1966), accompanied by a striking dust-jacket photo by Peter Hujar, helped establish Sontag's reputation as "The Dark Lady of American Letters." Movie stars like Woody Allen, philosophers like Arthur Danto, and politicians like Mayor John Lindsay met her.

Like Jane Fonda, Sontag went to Hanoi, and wrote of the North Vietnamese society with much sympathy and appreciation (see "Trip to Hanoi" in Styles of Radical Will). She maintained a distinction, however, between North Vietnam and Maoist China and the Soviet Union, as well as East-European communism, all of which she later criticized as "fascism with a human face."

Sontag's mother died of lung cancer in Hawaii in 1986.

Sontag died in New York City on 28 December 2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia. Sontag is buried in Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris. Her final illness has been chronicled by her son, David Rieff.