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Susan Sontag United States of America    PWF 2000

She published her first novel, The Benefactor, at the age of 30 after teaching philosophy at Columbia University. Her works includes three other novels, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, a volume of stories, I, Etcetera, and several collections of essays, including the prize-winning On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will and Under the Sign of Saturn. Although she always considered herself a fiction writer, she published nine works of non-fiction. Her essays often examined the contrast between high and low art. Her acclaimed essay Against Interpretation, helped establish her reputation as the “Dark Lady of American Letters”.

Similarly, her essay On Photography revolutionized the way media students and scholars viewed the camera in the modern world. Susan Sontag had always been effected by poignant images. She recalled seeing images of the Holocaust and thinking that something inside her “broke” that day. As a long time human rights activist, she served as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, where she led campaigns on behalf of persecuted writers. She has also written and directed four feature-length films and a play Alice in Bed. Over the course of her career Sontag received the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography, the National Book Award for In America, the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the 2001 Jerusalem Prize. She was also named a MacArthur Fellow between 1990 and 1995.

Susan Sontag died in New York City in December 2004 at 71, from myelodysplastic syndrome, which was a result of the chemotherapy and radiation she received for cancer years earlier.