The Legacy
In 1978 Sontag won the National Book Critics circle award for On Photography. In 1990 she won a MacArthur Fellowship. Italy awarded her the Malaparte Prize in 1992. In France she was the recipient of the Commandeur Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1990). She won the National Book Award for her novel In America in 2000. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the George Polk Award in 2002, the former in recognition of her work on behalf of individual freedom and the latter for her brilliant article “Looking at War” in the New Yorker. In 2003, the year before she died, she was honored with the Prince Asturias Award for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. In 2014 the New Republic included Susan Sontag in its ranking of the most important thinkers of the last one hundred years.1
Perhaps more than any other American author, Sontag became a public figure, commenting on major political and cultural events, traveling to theaters of war in Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia, and serving as the model of an activist writer in the tradition of André Malraux and Ernest Hemingway. In famous essays such as “Notes on ‘Camp’” and “Against Interpretation,” she sought to explore and define the changing nature of popular and elite culture while producing her own experimental stories and novels. Although she modified many of her positions and even recanted some of her opinions, she remained a cynosure of the American critical establishment. And even after her death, she remains a touchstone for many cultural commentators.
Almost every year since her death in 2004, a new book by or about Susan Sontag has appeared: Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag by Carl Rollyson (2005); Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman (2005); At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007); Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963 (2008); Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir by David Rieff (2008); Notes on Sontag by Philip Lopate (2009); The Scandal of Susan Sontag, a collection of essays (2009); Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez (2011); As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964–1980 (2012); Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan (2012); and Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott (2013).
This continuing concern with Sontag’s achievement is remarkable, since there is often a fallow period when even the greatest writers suffer neglect in the years immediately following their deaths. Not so with Sontag because she remains eminently quotable, far reaching in her interests and travels, and determined not only to make a mark on her time but to maintain adamantly the primary role of literature and the arts in the postmodern world. Her books and essays are taught in a wide variety of courses and disciplines—not surprising since she wrote about so many subjects: politics, medicine, literature, film, photography, and various aspects of popular culture. Her work in drama as a director and playwright and in fiction (especially as a historical novelist) is not generally regarded as highly as her nonfiction, but all aspects of her career continue to be discussed and debated because of her prominent role as a public intellectual.