Susan Sontag - Work

Work

Susan Sontag was a writer, professor, film-director, and advocate.

Sontag's literary career began and ended with works of fiction. While working on her fiction, Sontag taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and City University of New York and the philosophy of Religion under Jacob Taubes in the Religion Department at Columbia University from 1960 to 1964. Sontag held a writing fellowship at Rutgers University for 1964 to 1965 before ending her relationship with academia in favour of full-time, freelance writing. At age 30, she published an experimental novel called The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on 26 November 1986 in The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a significant text on the AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist with The Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel In America (2000). The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice.

Read more about this topic:  Susan Sontag

Famous quotes containing the word work:

    Do not put off your work until tomorrow and the day after. For the sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor the one who puts off his work; industry aids work, but the man who puts off work always wrestles with disaster.
    Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)

    Remember, a woman has to work harder than a man and have more patience in order to achieve success.
    Margaret Mary Morgan, U.S. suffragist, print shop owner, and politician. As quoted in Dianne Feinstein, ch. 5, by Jerry Roberts (1994)

    My life’s work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.
    Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)