Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s Queer Life

Reflections on Susan Sontag have yet to fully reckon with how fundamentally queerness shaped her writing and her life. Benjamin Moser’s controversial new biography Sontag finally begins that conversation.

Alessa Dominguez
Culture Writer
Posted on September 25, 2019, at 1:54 p.m. ET

Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. But, improbably, she did.

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work / Review by Terry Castle

 

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work 

BOOKS
TERRY CASTLE
December 2019

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco) succeeds as it does—magnificently, humanely—by displaying the same intellectual purchase, curiosity, and moral capaciousness to which his subject laid so inspiring and noble a claim over a lifetime. Susan Sontag was a difficult, galvanic presence in American arts and letters for half a century, and her biographer takes her measure with unfailing intelligence, honesty, and sympathy.