A new biography of writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004) by Benjamin Moser reveals that the famed essayist once had a short-lived affair with the painter Jasper Johns. The revelation about the unexpected ...

Susan Sontag took on writing and activism in the 20th century and continues her legacy through the archives at UCLA. An archive of Sontag’s work and belongings is housed in the Charles E. Young ...

Susan Sontag. She was a brand long before most writers knew they needed one. Even if you’ve never read a Sontag book, you can still engage with her seriousness by studying her darkly handsome, ...

The fascination of Sontag lies in her endurance as a cultural icon, the model of how a woman should think and write in public, even though her thinking and writing weren’t very rigorous. What is ...

SONTAG: Her Life and Work. By Benjamin Moser. Ecco. 816 pages. $39.99. It’s almost impossible to sand down Susan Sontag or even to come up with a consistent through-line for her life. She is always so ...

In this crisp and dispassionate biography, German critic Schreiber describes his subject’s life—what Sontag herself called a project—as a series of self-inventions and calculated publicity stunts that ...

Benjamin Moser lives in the Netherlands with his Dutch partner, but make no mistake: Houston is home. He grew up in West University Place, and his family’s Houston roots go back to the 19th century.

“I have always liked to pretend my body isn’t there,” Susan Sontag once wrote. But no matter how hard she tried, it never went away. She was stunningly inattentive to her physical self—surprised by ...