Susan Sontag / Her Life and Work

 

Sontag: Her Life and Work
by Benjamin Moser
(Ecco, Sept. 2019)

Reviewed by Stephen Piccarella

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work is the first authorized biography of Susan Sontag, the greatest cultural critic of the twentieth century. The book spans almost a hundred years of cultural and political history, and examines all of Sontag’s published and unpublished work, ranging from fictionalized memoir to academic writing on psychoanalysis to reporting on her experience producing a play in war-torn Bosnia. Moser is a recognized translator and biographer of Clarice Lispector, and to produce this latest work he spent seven years studying a massive archive of Sontag’s papers and interviewing her associates and intimates, some of them family members, others elite publishing luminaries. The book is not as exhaustive as some biographies, but tells the story of a life and of an era with diligence and enthusiasm. Moser’s does what a biography must, and well enough given the outsized reputation of its subject. For a general readership, Sontag is likely to stand alone as an authoritative work. 

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s Queer Life

Reflections on Susan Sontag have yet to fully reckon with how fundamentally queerness shaped her writing and her life. Benjamin Moser’s controversial new biography Sontag finally begins that conversation.

Alessa Dominguez
Culture Writer
Posted on September 25, 2019, at 1:54 p.m. ET

Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. But, improbably, she did.

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work / Review by Terry Castle

 

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work 

BOOKS
TERRY CASTLE
December 2019

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco) succeeds as it does—magnificently, humanely—by displaying the same intellectual purchase, curiosity, and moral capaciousness to which his subject laid so inspiring and noble a claim over a lifetime. Susan Sontag was a difficult, galvanic presence in American arts and letters for half a century, and her biographer takes her measure with unfailing intelligence, honesty, and sympathy.