About the Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: O
Magazine, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Seattle
Times
The definitive portrait of one of the American Century's most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money--and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated--and undermined--her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo--and featuring nearly one hundred images--Sontag is the first book based on the writer's restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait--a great American novel in the form of a biography.
About the Author :
Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil's first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. A former books columnist for Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, he has also written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books.
Review :
"Remarkably perceptive and penetrating." - National Review
"Succeeds as it does--magnificently, humanely--by displaying the same intellectual purchase, curiosity, and moral capaciousness to which [Sontag] laid so inspiring and noble a claim over a lifetime. . . . graceful, tactful, scrupulous, unerringly insightful . . . Moser's biography is a stunningly generous gift--to readers, obviously, but also to his subject. He is patient with her, truthful yet tender, recognizing both what was thrilling and what was cursed about her." - ArtForum
“A skilled, lively, prodigiously researched book that, in the main, neither whitewashes nor rebukes its subject: It works hard to make the reader see Sontag as the severely complex person she was. [Moser] writes vividly of a woman of parts determined to leave a mark on her time; and makes us feel viscerally how large those parts were -- the arrogance, the anxiety, the reach! No mean achievement.”
- Vivian Gornick The New York Times Book Review
Beautifully written and moving . . .[a] monumental achievement . . . This brilliant book matches Sontag's own brilliance and finally gives her the biography she deserves. - BookPage
[Sontag] was avid, ardent, driven, generous, narcissistic, Olympian, obtuse, maddening, sometimes loveable but not very likeable. Moser has had the confidence and erudition to bring all these contradictory aspects together in a biography fully commensurate with the scale of his subject. He is also a gifted, compassionate writer. - Elaine Showalter, The Times Literary Supplement
“Through it all, Moser tends to strike an effective balance between the kind of immersive detail Sontag specialists will eagerly expect and the kind of broader narrative momentum that ordinary readers will appreciate (and that might turn a few of them into Sontag specialists, always a pleasant side effect).” - Christian Science Monitor
"Moser ably chronicles Sontag's childhood, her youthful brilliance and glamour, her shaping of the public conversation--with essays and books like 'Notes on 'Camp' and 'Regarding the Pain of Others'--and her heroic efforts on behalf of the people of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war." - Seattle Times
"Glorious . . . an epiphany of research and storytelling, the definitive life of a writer both more and less than the myth she fastidiously crafted. [A] luminous achievement." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Engagingly written . . . With its personal details and gossip about New York literary parties, Moser's biography both entertains and scandalizes." - Mosaic
"Moser is a tenacious biographer, keeping a tight hold on his narrative and reaching firm conclusions. He is very tough-minded, as Sontag herself was at her best, and his mind is like Sontag's in that he can make very sharp turns and land decisive blows." - Nylon Magazine
"Fascinating . . . Moser's biography of Sontag is an education in Sontag, but also in what Sontag wanted and why, as well as an education in the worlds that inspired her and fought her." - Los Angeles Times
"Moser's epic portrait of the iconic writer and critic winds through American history, entwining its subject to pivotal points in our culture and reshaping her legacy in the process." - Entertainment Weekly, "20 New Books to Read in September"
"Persuasive and illuminating . . . does what a biography ought to do: it enriches our understanding of its subject." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Monumental and stylish." - The Atlantic
