Sontag: Her Life and Work

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Moser has given us the definitive biography of Susan Sontag. It is magisterial in sweep, deftly weaving precise analysis of her work and thought processes with details of her fabulous, engaged public and tortured private lives. The Sontag on offer is brilliant, prescient (scarily so), horrific, thoughtless, vulnerable, and enchanting. This is a deep dive, endlessly illuminating both the woman, her times, and the people she knew (and she knew everyone). Moser's biography is compelling and lucid. It made me gasp out loud (she said that!), cringe, laugh, and left me grateful for the insights and compassion contained within. Recommended By Kathi K., Powells.com

Benjamin Moser's extraordinary biography of Susan Sontag is a great gift to her many fans, and a wonderful introduction to those who might not know her work. Sontag: Her Life and Work is a remarkably thorough and utterly compelling portrait of one of the most important literary icons of the 20th century, and a necessary and intelligent companion to her work. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

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.

"A riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable — and just right." Kirkus

"Moser's accomplishment here is breathtaking: it includes an extraordinary knowledge of the subject, her milieu, her writings, her ideas, and her friends and family, beautiful prose, extraordinary insights, a capacity to understand her driven emotional life and her stellar intellectual life." Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them By Their True Names and Men Explain Things to Me

"In all the complex splendor of her brilliance and controversial intrepidness, Sontag has inspired numerous profiles and explications. Moser... draws on all of it in this watershed biography of America's last great literary star, and breaks new ground by virtue of his access to private archives, sagacious close-readings of Sontag's radical writings, and conducting of hundreds of interviews." Booklist (Starred Review)

"Sontag's influence on aesthetics, writing and the wider culture is almost impossible to overstate and Moser's monumental biography reveals the surprisingly tender, insecure, and intellectually dedicated story of one the most remarkable literary figures of twentieth century America. She stands reclaimed for our century in this definitive, fiercely intelligent work." Stephen Fry, author of The Ode Less Travelled

"A landmark achievement — astonishing in its scope, brilliant in its perceptiveness, and a joy to read. It deserves to be counted among the best nonfiction books of 2019." Jewish Book Council

"Don't be fooled by the length. This book is compulsive reading: moving, maddening, ridiculous and beautiful scenes from the life of Susan Sontag, and the epochs she traversed. Moser has a true and deep love for his subject, a love unafraid to be truthful, and it shows." Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

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.