FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ever since she took American culture by storm with the publication of her Notes on Camp in 1964, Susan Sontag has been a star. Her austere glamour has played a critical role in her success, making her a role model for intellectual women, a sex symbol for brainy men.

Sontag has never ceased to fascinate the public: as brilliant wunderkind, bringing the latest in French thought to America; as sophisticated analyst of her own experience with cancer in Illness as Metaphor; as champion of free speech in the Rushdie Affair; as theater director in besieged Sarajevo; and, with the publication of The Volcano Lover, as best-selling historical novelist. Yet she has both courted that fascination and insisted on holding it at a distance, demanding control over her public image.

This first biography delves beneath the surface to examine the forces that made Susan Sontag an international icon. Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock explore her public persona and private passions, including the strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame and her political moves and missteps. Above all, they show how the life of Susan Sontag reveals to us the way we live now.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

The writer Susan Sontag has turned down very little publicity over the years since setting American criticism on its ear with her essay "On Camp" in 1964. But, while the authors of this first life of Sontag acknowledge her uneasiness with the possible disclosures of biography, perhaps this reluctance has more to do with a legitimate fear of being trivialized. Rollyson and Paddock are far more deft on the subject of Sontag's evolving celebrity and famously glamorous book jacket photos than on her contributions to cultural criticism (e.g., Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor) or fiction (Death Kit, "The Way We Live Now," The Volcano Lover). The authors follow Sontag from her lonely, bookish childhood in Tucson, AZ, through her brilliant days at the University of Chicago and Harvard, early marriage and motherhood, divorce, life in Europe and New York, and journeys to China, Vietnam, Israel, and Sarajevo. The book sometimes has a tone of reluctant chattiness in discussing her literary rivalries or romantic quarrels with male and female lovers, and Sontag's lack of cooperation shows especially in the childhood sections that draw on published interviews. Her trademark hair turns up so often in the journalistic narrative that it gains a kind of sidekick status by book's end. An optional purchase, especially for libraries already owning A Susan Sontag Reader (1982). [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/00.]--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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