Featured White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
Susan Sontag, 1933-2004
Art in America, March, 2005 by Ted Mooney
Although Susan never entirely abandoned the essay form, she had begun as early as 1980 to feel that she was approaching the end of what it could do for her, and she turned increasingly to her primary love, fiction writing. The two novels that she had written early in her career--The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967)--had been indifferently received, and she herself expressed dissatisfaction with them, but beginning with the short stories collected in I, etcetera (1978), she worked to develop a voice that would allow her a freedom of address unavailable in the essays.
In 1992 she published the widely acclaimed novel The Volcano Lover, which, among many other things, is an extended meditation on the esthetic sensibility and the psychology of collecting. It was followed in 2000 by In America, for which she received the National Book Award in fiction. At the time of her death, she was working on a novel set in 20th-century Japan.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
