Susan Sontag, 71, the prolific critic and author who was as comfortable writing about pop culture as she was about politics and philosophy, died Dec. 28 in New York City after a long battle with cancer. One of America's most renowned and recognizable public intellectuals, Sontag spent four decades alternately enraging and enthralling readers.
A striking presence when she first came on the scene in the '60s — black-haired, dark-eyed, black-clad — Sontag appeared to be a medium channeling a full menu of liberation, both sexual and political. The essay that first brought her stormy attention, 1964's ''Notes on Camp,'' defended a mainly gay sensibility that upended cultural values by canonizing kitsch and trivia.
Other provocations followed — ''Against Interpretation,'' ''The Pornographic Imagination,'' ''Trip to Hanoi.'' But more controversial — in intellectual circles, at least — was Sontag's enthusiasm for pop culture (her 1965 remark that it was all right to like the Supremes went off like a bomb). She could spend her days writing about the thorniest issues, but at night she was often seen in deafening downtown Manhattan rock clubs. A brush with cancer — and death — came in the mid-'70s. She became, she said, a deeper person; her best work of fiction, 1992's The Volcano Lover, was an emotionally rich historical novel.
In person warm and cheerful, devoted to friends and conversation, Sontag found her deepest affinity with some of the solitary figures of European modernism, holding Nietzsche, Kafka, and Proust in high regard. But she seemed to belong to no movement, decade, or country, directing films in Sweden and the play Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo (which made her an honorary citizen in 1993), living in Paris and New York City, fulfilling her ideal of serious, skeptical, fiercely independent intelligence.
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