Heritage · Legacy
Susan Sontag Legacy
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American writer and critic whose essays, from Notes on Camp to On Photography, reshaped how the public read culture.Written to last — not to trend.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · Updated 2026-07-31 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, not a toolbar.
Susan Sontag was an American writer, essayist and critic whose work helped set the terms of cultural debate in the second half of the twentieth century. Born Susan Lee Rosenblatt in New York City on 16 January 1933, she became known for essays that moved easily between high art and popular taste, among them Notes on 'Camp' (1964), the collection Against Interpretation (1966) and On Photography (1977) (Britannica). She was also a novelist and a public figure whose activism, from opposition to the Vietnam War to her time in besieged Sarajevo, kept her in view until her death in 2004 (Wikipedia).
Sontag's father, Jack Rosenblatt, was a fur trader who worked in northern China; he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when she was five. She later took the surname of her mother's second husband, Captain Nathan Sontag, though she was never formally adopted (Encyclopedia.com). The family moved often, living in Tucson, Arizona, and then Los Angeles, where reading became her refuge from what she remembered as a lonely and emotionally distant childhood.
She finished North Hollywood High School at fifteen and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she took a bachelor's degree in 1951 at the age of eighteen (Britannica). At Chicago she married the sociology instructor Philip Rieff in 1950, ten days after they met; their son, David Rieff, later an author and editor in his own right, was born in 1952, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1958. Sontag went on to graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and spent time at the University of Oxford and the University of Paris, where contact with European writers and thinkers shaped the critical voice of her early work (Wikipedia).
Sontag settled in New York City in 1959 and began publishing fiction and criticism. Wide recognition came in 1964 with Notes on 'Camp', an essay in the Partisan Review that treated a sensibility of irony, artifice and exaggeration as a serious subject and introduced camp to a broad readership (Encyclopedia.com). Two years later she gathered her early pieces in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). Its title essay argued against reducing art to hidden meaning, asking critics to attend to the sensory experience of a work rather than explain it away (Britannica).
On Photography (1977) collected essays first published in the New York Review of Books and examined how the spread of images changes the way people see the world and remember it. After a diagnosis of breast cancer in 1975, she wrote Illness as Metaphor (1978), which criticised the language that turns disease into a mark of shame or moral failing; she extended the argument to a later epidemic in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) (Wikipedia). Alongside the essays she wrote fiction throughout her career. The Volcano Lover (1992) reached a wide readership, and her novel In America won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2000.
Sontag's essays remain reference points in cultural studies, and her books on photography and illness are still read across the humanities and in medical education. Her writing on camp became an early touchstone for later work in queer theory. She was also an activist and public intellectual: she opposed the Vietnam War and travelled to Hanoi in 1968, and during the siege of Sarajevo she staged a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1993 (Britannica). Her later honours included the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2003. Sontag died of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome in New York City on 28 December 2004 and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris (Wikipedia). Her long relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz drew wide interest, but it is her essays, and their case for taking culture seriously, that remain her clearest legacy.
Sontag spent her life paying close attention to images, illness and the words we use to frame them. We keep her here because that habit of looking hard at how a life is recorded is close to the work of an archive.
Early life
The essays and criticism
Legacy
Why Confinity keeps Susan
References
Timeline
- 1933Born Susan Lee Rosenblatt in New York City
- 1951Takes a B.A. from the University of Chicago
- 1964Publishes the essay Notes on 'Camp'
- 1966Against Interpretation collects her early essays
- 1977On Photography examines the culture of images
- 1993Stages Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo
- 2004Dies in New York City