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.
| ISBN: | 9780062896407 |
| Publication date: | 15th September 2020 |
| Author: | Benjamin Moser |
| Publisher: | Ecco Press an imprint of HarperCollins |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 832 pages |
| Genres: |
Autobiography: general The arts: general topics History of art Individual artists, art monographs Individual photographers Fashion and textile design Biography: arts and entertainment Biography: historical, political and military Biography: writers Memoirs Gender studies: women and girls LGBTQ+ Studies / topics Ethnic groups and multicultural studies |
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.
Sontag features in the following genres: Autobiography: general, The arts: general topics, History of art, Individual artists, art monographs, Individual photographers, Fashion and textile design, Biography: arts and entertainment, Biography: historical, political and military, Biography: writers, Memoirs, Gender studies: women and girls, LGBTQ+ Studies / topics, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies
Sontag is available in Paperback, Hardback
Sontag was written by Benjamin Moser and published by Ecco Press an imprint of HarperCollins
Sontag has 832 pages