Path: Lesbians : Famous lesbians : Susan Sontag
(This is a computer translation of the original article in Spanish. It should not be regarded as complete or accurate.)
Writer Susan Sontag was born in New York City (United States) in 1933, although she grew in Tucson (Arizona). Her father, Jack Rosenblatt, a Jewish merchant of skins, died of tuberculosis in China when Sontag was five years old. Her mother, Mildred Jacobsen, married captain Nathan Sontag seven years later. According to words of proper Susan her infancy was "a long jail condemnation". At the age of fifteen, she joined the University of California, and one year later she continued her studies in the University of Chicago where she graduated in Philosophy and Lettering with only eighteen years. During her stay in the university, with seventeen years, she married a teacher of sociology eleven major than she, Philip Rieff, after an engagement of ten days, and that would get divorced in 1950. Later she got doctor's degree on Philosophy, Literature and Theology on the University of Harvard.
After working as lecturer and teacher of religion, joined in 1960 to the Partisan Magazine where she would begin contacts with many intellectuals of New York. During the 60s and 70s she had a big influence in the new forms of art and turned into a creator of opinion into the North American society. In 1963 she published her first novel, The benefactor, a symbolic work where she treats on the formation of the character. In 1964 she wrote a essay where she was examining the homosexual esthetics. Politically, Sontag was considered to be a radical - liberal woman nearer to the European thought (of which she was a big expert) than to the American. With regard to the art, Sontag was thinking that the most important thing there was not the meaning or the interpretation but the intuitive response that it was had before the work, the conjunction of style and content, since left patent in her titled collection of essays of 1968 The interpretation and other essays. Earlier, in 1967, she had published her second novel, Death Kit, that treats on the relations between the life and the death. In 1968 she traveled to Hanoi during the bombings of the United States and criticized hardly the War of Vietnam.
In 1969 she publishes Styles of Radical Will, where she analyzes topics as the pornographic literature, the drugs, the movies and the modern art. In 1976 appeared a new collection of essays titled On Photography, where again she was affecting in the absence of meaning as form of art. Later the photographer Annie Leibowitz, her sentimental partner for ten years, said that her concepts on the photography had changed after reading her work. In 1975 Susan was diagnosed cancer; and, three years later she published The Illness As Metaphor, where she was criticizing the pejorative treatment that one usually gives to the word "cancer" to refer to an evil in other ambiences that are not those of the illness. In 1988 she checked and extended this book and changed the title to AIDS and Its Metaphors, where it was spreading her criticism of the ideological use that had been given to this illness. In 1992 she published her third novel, The Volcano Lover, ambienced in the XVIIIth century (and written in the style of this epoch), that it was a success of sales.
From 1993 until 1996, Sontag traveled to Sarajevo during the War of Bosnia and from there she criticized the American participation in the war. In 1999 her fourth and last novel appears, In America, based on the real history of an actress who in 1876 was to live to a Utopian commune. For this novel she got the National Award of Literature in 2000. After the terrorist act to the Towers Twins of New York, Sontag wrote that it was consequence of the actions and alliances of America, and that the terrorists could not be qualified as cowards, affirmations for which later she would apologize. In 2003 Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, where it is analyzed the way of facing the atrocious images of the war on the part of the people. Apart from her novels, histories, and essays, also she wrote several scripts for experimental movies. Her works have been translated to twenty-six languages and her role as thinker and criticism has came out the limits of her country going so far as to turn into a myth for her defense of different causes: her protests against the war of Vietnam, Bosnia or Iraq, her struggle for the equality of the women and the rights of the blacks, her criticism of the dictatorship of Fidel Castro, etc. Between her most out-standing awards there are the Order of the Arts and the Lettering of France (1999), National Book (2000), the Jerusalem of Literature (2001) and the Prince of Asturias (2003). Although there was not known big part of her private life, she confessed New Yorker in an interview that her lesbianism was an "open secret". Also rumors arose from that one of the children of Susan, David, realized a donation of semen so that Annie Leibowitz, couple of her mother, could remain a pregnant woman, and the photographer gave birth to a girl. Sontag endured different types of cancer (of lung, of womb and of blood) for thirty years. She died on December 28, 2004 as a consequence of the leukemia.
Description: biography for susan sontag, lesbian writers, life of susan sontag, lesbian writer, lesbian novelists, history of susan sontag, susan sontag and annie leibowitz, bisexual, lesbian writers, lesbian, bisexual novelists, lesbianism susan sontag.
Access to: History of the lesbianism - Famous lesbians
The complete text of this page has been registered legally and
www.lesbianas.tv is the owner.
The copy of any part of this text without intention of appointment will be
informed the pertinent authorities.
© Latin Networks Ltd Corp., 2005.