Happy Birthday, Susan Sontag

Born January 16, 1933, New York, NY | Died December 28, 2004, New York, NY

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates essayist, critic, public intellectual, and novelist Susan Sontag on the ninety-second anniversary of her birth. The recipient of many accolades and international honors, Sontag received the National Book Award for her novel In America. The guest editor of The Best American Essays 1992, Sontag’s essays have been reprinted twice in the series and listed four times as Notable.

Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.

Susan Sontag, 1966, Peter Hujar.

“An essay is not an article, not a meditation, not a book review, not a memoir, not a disquisition, not a diatribe, not a shaggy dog story, not a monologue, not a travel narrative, not a suite of aphorisms, not an elegy, not a piece of reportage—

No, an essay can be any or several of the above.”

Portrait of Susan Sontag, 1994, by Bolivian artist Juan Fernando Bastos.

“If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension of my sympathis to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”

Against Interpretation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) was Susan Sontag’s first book of collected essays. On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), comprises a series of essays published originally in The New York Review of Books between 1973-1977 which examine the history and role of contemporary photography. It won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) , Sontag’s last published book before her death in 2004, is a longform essay, which Sontag regarded as a sequel to—and reassessment of some of the ideas in—On Photography.

First published essay:

• “Notes on ‘Camp’,” The Partisan Review, 1964, reprinted in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins, 2000).

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s and 70s, edited by David Rieff (Library of America, 2013).

• Susan Sontag: Later Essays, edited by David Rieff (Library of America, 2017).

Essays by Susan Sontag reprinted (R) in The Best American Essays (BAE), or listed in Notables (N):

• “Looking at War,” The New Yorker, 2002 (BAE 2003, R).

• “Where the Stress Falls,” The New Yorker, 2001 (BAE 2002, N).

• “The Decay of Cinema,” The New York Times Magazine, 1996 (BAE 1997, R).

• “Godot Comes to Sarajevo,” New York Review of Books, 1993 (BAE 1994, N).

• “Pilgrimage,” The New Yorker, 1987 (BAE 1988, N).

• “On Mapplethorpe,” Vanity Fair, 1985 (BAE 1986, N).

See also, works by authors whose essays have been reprinted in (R) or listed as Notable in (N) The Best American Essays (BAE) series:

• A. O. Scott, “Under the Sign of Susan,” The New York Times Magazine, 2019 (BAE 2020, R).

• Emily St. John Mandel, “Susan Sontag, Essayist and So Much Else,” Humanities, 2014 (BAE 2015, N).

• Sigrid Nunez, “Sontag's Rules,” Tin House, 2009 (BAE 2010, N).

Visit the Susan Sontag Foundation

Read “Susan Sontag Was a Monster,” Lauren Elkin, Aeon, 2019.

Read “The Other Susan Sontag,” Tobi Haslett, The New Yorker, 2017.

Read Edward Hirsch’s interview with Sontag in The Paris Review, 1995.

Watch Susan Sontag speaking and reading from her novel In America at the San Francisco Public Library, 2001.

Watch an interview with Sontag, speaking about the Bosnian War, 1995.

Watch an interview with Chris Lydon, 1992.

Watch John Berger and Susan Sontag in conversation, 1983.