Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon

by Carl Rollyson, Lisa Paddock

"The book neither sympathizes with its subject nor trashes her. A kind of semiruthless, semi-good-natured impersonality prevails throughout....This book never penetrates the glazed surface of Sontag's appearance or the formal character of her work....[However] many interviews were conducted with friends and enemies alike, the reader is left knowing that a wall still stands behind which Susan Sontag lurks, undetected and unknown." ―Vivian Gornick, Salon , 08/01/2000 The first--and unauthorized--biography of the so-called dark lady of American letters. Ever since she took American culture by storm with the publication of her Notes on Camp in 1964, Susan Sontag has been a star. Her austere glamour has been a critical factor in her success, making her a role model for intellectual women, a sex symbol for brainy men. She has never ceased to fascinate the public: as brilliant wunderkind, bringing the latest in French thought to America; as sophisticated analyst of her own experience with cancer in Illness as Metaphor; as champion of free speech in the Rushdie Affair; as theater director in besieged Sarajevo; and, with the publication of The Volcano Lover , as best-selling historical novelist. Yet she has both courted that fascination and insisted on holding it at a distance, demanding control over her public image. This first--and most definitely unauthorized--biography delves beneath the surface to examine the forces that made Susan Sontag an international icon. Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock explore her public persona and private passions, including the strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame and her political moves and missteps. Above all, they show how the life of Susan Sontag reveals to us the way we live now.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Philosophy

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Carl Rollyson, Professor of Journalism at Baruch College, The City University of New York, has published more than forty books ranging in subject matter from biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Jill Craigie to studies of American culture, genealogy, children’s biography, film, and literary criticism. He has authored more than 500 articles on American and European literature and history. His work has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times and the London Sunday Telegraph and in journals such as American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. For four years (2003-2007) he wrote a weekly column, "On Biography," for The New York Sun and was President of the Rebecca West Society (2003-2007). His play, THAT WOMAN: REBECCA WEST REMEMBERS, has been produced at Theatresource in New York City. Rollyson is currently researching a biography of Amy Lowell (awarded a "We the People" NEH grant). "Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, a biography of Dana Andrews is forthcoming in September from University Press of Mississippi. His biography, "American Isis: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath" will be published in February 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of her death. His reviews of biography appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Kansas City Star, and The New Criterion. He is currently advisory editor for the Hollywood Legends series published by the University Press of Mississippi. He welcomes queries from those interested in contributing to the series. Read his column, "Biographology," that appears every two weeks at bibliobuffet.com

Reviews

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Partial) re-read to prepare for a talk about Sontag.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography of Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000) I came across references to a twentieth-century author Alfred Chester. Chester is one of those fascinating characters that one encounters in such biographies but who proves elusive when searching for information related to him specifically. Reading biographies provides context for understanding the lives of a lot of authors and artists that I admire but they always have limitations fostered by the medium. While they can often rise above these limitations (see Elsa the Guerilla Girl) too often it is easy to fall back on chronological lists of who, what, when and where with the psycho-babble that is so popular in such books. What I like to take away from these books is the discovery of people like Chester, the characters who unfortunately make life sparkle but who quickly disappear from the pages of history calling forth inquiry and discovery.

[Joshua Loong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a fully complete biography, as this book ends at the close of the 90s, whereas Sontag would continue to live until 2004. This makes the book both really interesting and potentially troubling.

On the one hand, a book released so close in time to her life would be able to access so many more of her contemporaries in interview, and unearth the rumours and whispers that might have been lost to the grave. On the other hand, the farther in time one goes, the more likely it is for us to appreciate her work critically from a measured distance, as well as access records/individuals that were unlikely to talk during her life. Of which this latter point is particularly salient because of how much power Sontag had over the intellectual institutions of New York. There was a recent biography of Sontag that came out to much fanfare, and I am excited to read it even just merely to contrast the two influences.

But in any case, as a biography, this was good but not amazing. Much of the power of this book was in the detailed critical work around all of her published pieces. It relies heavily on outside reviews, quotations, and notes from contemporaneous writers to get a better sense of how her work was received in its time. As she published each new piece, we see the reactions to her work as if we were there following along. This was fantastic.

The biography portions of it seemed to rely a lot on anonymous interviews. What parts of this I can trust whole heatedly is debatable. The finer biographical details of her life I think would be better suited to be found in something with more distance as I mentioned before.

All of this makes me really excited to get back into all of Sontag’s work. I might just have to pick up the Library of America edition to get all of her essays in one go.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A genius maligned, this one. Susan Sontag was indeed what Carl Rollyson calls her, "the most important public intellectual of her generation". She was perfect for the Sixties: Mod, hip, ever ready to epater le bourgeoisie, flippant, beautiful, and spoke French. The subjects of her essays, Godard, Cioran, Levi-Strauss, Bergman, were all au courant. She knew film, fashion and fiction. Sontag's political commitments, the famous trip to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, for and later against the Castro regime in Cuba, perfectly fit the temper of youth protesting out in the streets. Her ambiguous feelings towards feminism reflected both her privileged upbringing and wish for privacy concerning her sex life. When the calendar turned from 1969 to 1970 Sontag flipped too; devoting her writing more towards personal hobbies, photography, and her own battle with cancer (ILLNESS AS METAPHOR). All this makes for a fascinating portrait, so why is this biography so lifeless and dull? The writing is pedestrian and Rollyson never gives a hint on why he considers Sontag worthy of a revisit after several other biographers of late have scrutinized her life. Valuable end notes are the only point of interest in this latest entry in Sontag studies.

[Veronica Rooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this ! The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because sometimes it became a bit dull when Rollyson was analyzing one of her works in depth. But overall I’m a slut for anyone’s life story and Susan Sontag has lived so many lives. A fascinating, not always flattering look at a highly complicated individual. Bonus points for all the book recommendations I got while reading

[Kasia · Rating 2 out of 5]

te dwie gwiazdki to docenienie researchu tylko

[Liam Woods · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted to like this, tried to for a long time, just doesn't got enough humanity between the pages. I'm not entirely sure whether or not this is a product of the writing itself, or of Sontag as a subject. This would maybe be a good book for someone who is already familiar with Sontag's work, but don't use it as an introduction to the icon, as I attempted to do.

[Jeanne T. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think that I prefer biographies about people who I know something about already. I got really bored reading this book and while I am sure that Susan Sontag was an amazing woman, I know very little about her and it wasn't interesting enough (by the time I was done with her childhood) to keep going.

[Gail McConnell]

knowing less is often preferable