Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an American essayist, novelist, critic and screenwriter whose writing on art, culture, photography and illness shaped intellectual life for decades. Her essay collection Against Interpretation was a National Book Award finalist in 1967. Her other books of essays include On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Under the Sign of Saturn and AIDS and Its Metaphors.

Sontag also wrote fiction. Her novels include The Benefactor, Death Kit and The Volcano Lover. In America (2000), about a Polish actress who emigrates to California in the 1870s, won the National Book Award for Fiction.

She was also a theater director, short story writer and human rights advocate, and she served as president of PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989. Sontag died in 2004.