Susan Sontag, novelist and essay writer, is born on this day in New York City in 1933.
Sontag's parents lived in China, where her father was a fur trader, but Sontag's mother returned to the United States for her daughter's birth and left the newborn with relatives. After her father's death, when Sontag was a toddler, her mother returned to the States and remarried. The family moved to Arizona, then Southern California, where Sontag attended North Hollywood High. A fiercely intellectual student, Sontag went on to the University of California at Berkeley, then attended the University of Chicago and Harvard, getting a doctorate in English literature and philosophy. Along the way, she married (at age 17), had a son (at age 19), and divorced (at age 26). She also began publishing essays and writing fiction
At age 30, she sent off the manuscript of her first book, The Benefactor, addressed simply to "The Fiction Editor" at Farrar Straus Giroux. The publishing house immediately bought the novel for a $500 advance, and she remained with the same publisher for decades. Her 1964 essay, "Notes on Camp," published in the Partisan Review, made her a celebrity at age 31, when she defined the appeal of camp culture. She published another novel, Death Kit, in 1967 but turned her attention toward essays, nonfiction, and politics in the late 60s and 70s. She lived in Europe from 1968 to 1974. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1972, she turned her illness into her best-known work, Illness as Metaphor (1977). In 1992, she surprised her readers with a historical romance, The Volcano Lover, set in 18th-century Naples.
Sontag died on December 28, 2004.
