Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated

by Carl Rollyson, Lisa Paddock

Overview

An intimate portrait of the famed writer, director, and activist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496808462
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	08/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	910,585
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1&2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun. Lisa Paddock is a freelance writer and editor.
Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1&2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun.
Lisa Paddock is a freelance writer and editor. She is also coauthor (with Carl Rollyson) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated, published by University Press of Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Chapter 1 My Desert Childhood (1933-45) 3

Chapter 2 A World Elsewhere (1945-48) 16

Chapter 3 Towards a Better Life (1949-53) 26

Chapter 4 The Life and the Project (1953-57) 43

Chapter 5 Quest (1957-58) 52

Chapter 6 Making It (1958-62) 63

Chapter 7 Made (1962-63) 73

Chapter 8 Supremacy (1963-64) 86

Chapter 9 Fame (1965-66) 95

Chapter 10 Peter and Paul (1965-67) 111

Chapter 11 Neo-Radicalism (1967-69) 126

Chapter 12 Styles of Radical Will (1968-71) 137

Chapter 13 Ms. Sontag (1971-73) 153

Chapter 14 Promised Lands (1973-74) 164

Chapter 15 "Old Complaints Revisited" (1975) 170

Chapter 16 Becoming a Little Posthumous (1975-77) 176

Chapter 17 Recovery (1976-77) 181

Chapter 18 The Salonistes (1977-85) 189

Chapter 19 I, etcetera (1978-79) 210

Chapter 20 A "Wandering Jew (1980) 217

Chapter 21 Susan the Apostate (1982) 223

Chapter 22 Retrospection and Retaliation (1982-83) 230

Chapter 23 President Sontag (1984-89) 236

Chapter 24 Pitching Susan Sontag (1986-89) 254

Chapter 25 "The Way We Live Now" (1987-92) 261

Chapter 26 Vie Volcano Lover (1990-92) 271

Chapter 27 Sarajevo (1993-95) 279

Chapter 28 The End and the Beginning (1991-99) 288

Chapter 29 Recovery and Rejection (1999-2003) 300

Chapter 30 Finis (2004) 310

Coda 314

Acknowledgments 316

Notes and Comments 319

Works Cited 343

Index 353

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION: "Although she has occupied a central place in the twin worlds of literary and popular culture since her influential first essays appeared in the Partisan Review in the early 1960s, this is the first full-length biography and one of the few critical studies of the author and her work. Rollyson and Paddock have unearthed a deluge of information on Sontag's personal life—on her early years and family life, her lesbianism (which she has only recently publicly acknowledged), her relationship with son David Rieff, and her battles with breast cancer."

—Publishers Weekly




"Rollyson and Paddock's determined research, especially the interviews they conducted with more than a hundred men and women who knew Sontag, many of whom have since died, make this book a valuable resource. It is not a sympathetic biography, but it is serious and informed, seeing her as a grandly self-created artist."

—Times Literary Supplement




"With new access to letters and diaries, Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock have deepened their earlier, fine-grained portrait of Susan Sontag so the reader can see, more clearly than ever, how Sontag created herself and her world. It was a world of refuge and prospect, in which her prodigious reading both reduced and enlarged her perceptions of experience, welcoming myths and marvels and—if she had had her way, which she very nearly did—excluding death itself. The careful attention to detail and the penetrating interpretations of writings, readings, and relationships in this fine and respectful book compellingly animate a life of energy, curiosity, and vividness."

—Tracy Daugherty, author of biographies of Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller, and Joan Didion, as well as of nine books of fiction and two volumes of essays

From the Publisher