The work that first brought critic Susan Sontag attention, and teed her up to join the unenviable (in the end) circle of those “famous for being famous,” were essays she wrote in her twenties for the small magazine Partisan Review, a place that perhaps tops the list of upstart American journals punching above their weight in influence. The PR talent pool was fed by two streams of postwar American opinion: immigrants and the children of immigrants who hungrily lapped up the opportunity for higher education, and formidably learned refugee intellectuals who had fled the inferno of Europe in the thirties and forties. Sontag herself had willed her way out of a sleepy provincial childhood presided over by a negligent widowed mother (born in Los Angeles, in 1904, to Jewish immigrants from Białystok) into the University of Chicago, a haven for the above two contingents, as a teenager, having read her way through the Modern Library volumes she found at the back of a Tucson drugstore, and after that every book she could find. She joined a generation anxious to distill the ponderous edifice of Western Civilization into the voice of a democracy outgrowing its skin.
Part 2 just posted! The moment seemed to call for a comprehensive review of SS's work and influence, which was I fear beyond my little powers.... Did my best.
Review: Ann Kjellberg on Susan Sontag, Part I
Splendid, splendid--I cannot wait for part 2!
I echo April’s thoughts
Oh, Ann, thank you so much for this!!
Part 2 just posted! The moment seemed to call for a comprehensive review of SS's work and influence, which was I fear beyond my little powers.... Did my best.