usan Sontag, the internationally renowned novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences - and one of the most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died today in New York. She was 71 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor" (1978).
A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960's, Ms. Sontag was the author of four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories, and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades, her work occupied a place of prominence in the contemporary canon, discussed in such diverse forums as graduate seminars, the pages of popular magazines and the Hollywood movie "Bull Durham."
Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels "Death Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover" (1992) and "In America" (2000); the essay collections "Against Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will" (1969) and "Under the Sign of Saturn" (1982); the critical studies "On Photography" (1977) and "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989); and the short-story collection "I, Etcetera" (1978).
Her most recent book, published last year, was "Regarding the Pain of Others," a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. One of her last published essays, "Regarding the Torture of Others," written in response to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison, appeared in The New York Times Magazine of May 23, 2004.
Ms. Sontag's writing marked a radical break with traditional postwar criticism. She advocated a sensualist approach to the study of art, championed aesthetic form over content and - most subversive - gleefully blurred the boundaries between high and low culture. Learned, thoughtful, deeply cerebral, often provocative, her work repeatedly explored the transcendent experience of making, and looking at, contemporary art, with its jagged edges and attendant themes of alienation and despair. She was concerned throughout her career with sensation, in both meanings of the word.
"What Susan did was, she dealt as a literary and philosophical intellectual with the deep problems of human life in our times," Arthur Danto, the Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University and an art critic for The Nation, said in a telephone interview today. "She was never a dispassionate or disinterested writer. She always used her own experience as a way of giving meaning to issues that had meaning for everybody."
Unlike most serious intellectuals, Ms. Sontag was also a popular celebrity, partly because of her striking, telegenic appearance, partly because of her outspoken, at times inflammatory, public statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics' Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazine; and pose for an Absolut Vodka ad. Over the decades, her image - strong features, wide mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned in later years by a sweeping streak of white - became an instantly recognizable artifact of 20th-century popular culture.
Trained in literature and philosophy, Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her, a radical stance at the time.
For Ms. Sontag, "culture" encompassed a vast, potentially limitless, landscape. She wrote serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema and science fiction, that earlier critics disdained. She produced impassioned essays on the (mostly French) writers and filmmakers she admired, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard. She wrote experimental novels on dreams and the nature of consciousness. She published painstaking critical dissections of photography and dance; illness, politics and pornography; and, most famously, the covert subculture of camp. Her work, with its emphasis on the outré, the jagged-edged and the here-and-now, helped make the study of popular culture a respectable academic pursuit.
What united Ms. Sontag's output was a propulsive desire to define the forces - aesthetic, moral, political - that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she hoped to understand what it meant to be human in the waning years of the 20th century.
To many observers, Ms. Sontag's work was bold and thrilling. Interviewed in The New York Times Magazine in 1992, the eminent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes compared Ms. Sontag to the Renaissance humanist Erasmus. "This is one of the worst-informed eras in history, just like the beginning of the 15th century," he said. "Countries are ignorant about each other. And, like Erasmus, exactly when it is needed, Susan Sontag is a communicator in this broken-down world. Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing. Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate."
Other critics were less enthralled. Some branded Ms. Sontag an unoriginal thinker, a popularizer with a gift for aphorism who could boil down difficult writers for mass consumption. (Irving Howe called her "a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother's patches.") Some regarded her tendency to revisit her earlier, often controversial, positions as ambivalent. Some saw her scholarly approach to popular art forms as pretentious. (Ms. Sontag once remarked that she could appreciate Patti Smith because she had read Nietzsche.)
She had a knack - or perhaps a penchant - for getting into trouble. She could be provocative to the point of being inflammatory, as when she championed the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in a 1965 essay (she would revise her position some years later); celebrated the Communist societies of Cuba and North Vietnam (just as provocatively, she later denounced Communism as a form of fascism); and, in the wake of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, wrote in The New Yorker, "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." And in 2000, the publication of Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," raised accusations of plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied.
Over four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, trendy, iconoclastic, captivating, hollow, rhapsodic, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, abrasive, aloof, attention-seeking, charming, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, mannered, formidable, brilliant, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, challenging, ambivalent, accessible, lofty, erudite, lucid, inscrutable, solipsistic, intellectual, visceral, reasoned, pretentious, portentous, maddening, lyrical, abstract, narrative, acerbic, opportunistic, chilly, effusive, careerist, sober, gimmicky, relevant, passé, facile, illogical, ambivalent, polemical, didactic, tenacious, slippery, celebratory, banal, untenable, doctrinaire, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, aloof, glib, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull.
Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1933, the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt and the former Mildred Jacobson. Her father was a fur trader in China, and her mother joined him there for long periods, leaving Susan and her younger sister, Judith, in the care of relatives.
When Susan was 5, her father died in China, of tuberculosis. Seeking relief for Susan's asthma, her mother moved the family to Tucson, Ariz., where they spent the next several years. In Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. Nathan Sontag, a World War II veteran sent there to recuperate. The couple were married - Susan took her stepfather's name - and the family moved to Los Angeles.
For Susan, a student so gifted she graduated from high school before her 16th birthday, the philistinism of American culture was a torment she vowed early to escape. "My greatest dream," she later wrote, "was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people."
She would get her wish - Ms. Sontag burst onto the scene with "Notes on Camp," published in Partisan Review in 1964 - but not before she earned a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees from prestigious American universities; studied at Oxford on a fellowship; and married, became a mother and divorced eight years later, all by the time she turned 26.
After high school, Ms. Sontag spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which she received a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1951. At Chicago, she wandered into a class taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor who would write the celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking, 1959). He was, she would say, the first person with whom she could really talk; they were married 10 days later. Ms. Sontag was 17 and looked even younger, clad habitually in blue jeans, her black hair spilling down her back. Word swept around campus that Dr. Rieff had married a 14-year-old American Indian.
Moving with her husband to Boston, Ms. Sontag went on to earn two master's degrees from Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the second in philosophy the following year. She began work on a doctorate in philosophy but did not complete her dissertation.
In 1952, she and Dr. Rieff became the parents of a son. The couple divorced in 1958. Ms. Sontag is survived by her son, David Rieff, who lives in Manhattan and was for many years her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (A journalist, he is the author of "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West," published by Simon & Schuster in 1995.) Also surviving is her younger sister, Judith Cohen, of Maui.
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