Susan Sontag

From Philosopedia

Sontag, Susan (16 January 1933 - 28 December 2004)

Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City of Jewish-American parents, she was five when her father died in China of tuberculosis. When her mother married Nathan Sontag, she and her sister Judith took their stepfather's surname. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago, then did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard, St. Anne's College, Oxford, and the Sorbonne.

When 17, after a ten-day courtship, she married Philip Rieff. Their son, David, later became his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Sontag divorced Rieff in 1958.

Allegedly, Sontag had committed relationships with choreographer Lucinda Childs, writer Maria Irene Fornes, photographer Annie Leibovitz, and others. She made no secret of her bisexuality, saying in an interview to the United Kingdom's Guardian (2000),

• "Shall I tell you about getting older?", she says, and she is laughing. "When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?" She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. "No, hang on," she says. "Actually, it's nine. Five women, four men."

Sontag, the critic and one of the most important of the “new intellectuals,” may or may not have gone on record concerning her non-theism, but she wrote,

• Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing away their minds.

At the age of 71, she died from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome that evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia. Her funeral was private. She is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.