Collection: Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American writer, critic and public intellectual whose essays reshaped the language of cultural and aesthetic debate in the second half of the twentieth century. Her early collections — Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969) and On Photography (1977) — established a critical practice that moved between art, film, literature and politics without subordinating any one to the others. Her essay The Pornographic Imagination (1967), later collected in Styles of Radical Will, provided one of the most sustained critical accounts of Bataille’s Histoire de l’Œil and appeared in the 1989 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of Story of the Eye. Sontag was awarded the National Book Award in 2000 for her novel In America.