Sontag

This is, yes, a biography of Sontag: the paradigm of the public intellectual in the second half of the American twentieth century; the renewing of criticism, which embraced and valued (without necessarily leveling them) the supposedly "high" and "low"; the totemic figure, as intimidating as it is magnetic, present at every conference, and also on every magazine cover: almost a trademark. But this biography begins as that of Sue Rosenblatt, who began to transform when at the age of eleven, and after adopting her stepfather's surname, she decided to stop being an outsider. "I am only interested in people who have embarked on a project of personal transformation," wrote Susan Sontag in her diaries, and in Sontag Benjamin Moser follows his metamorphosis while still paying attention to the cracks through which Sue can still be glimpsed: " my 'true me', that inert being. That me from which I flee, in part, when I am with other people ". Her first texts in Chicago Review; her marriage to the professor and essayist Philip Rieff, and the true authorship of the first book of this; the birth of her son David, to whom she was joined by a problematic dependency; her seasons in England and Paris; the rediscovery of her sexuality and her most lasting relationships, with the playwright María Irene Fornés and the photographer Annie Leibovitz; and, above all, the construction of a career cultivated in The New York Review of Books and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in which his essays pointed out to entire generations what was worth looking at, where to look at it, and what it actually meant to do. And, going through all the places where Sontag looked, Moser also draws a map of the main intellectual debates of his time: opposition to the Vietnam War, Cuba as a promise, communism, feminist commitment or the AIDS crisis, but also the siege of Sarajevo or the fatwa decreed against Salman Rushdie.