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Soc (2015) 52:195197DOI 10.1007/s12115-015-9883-5
BOOK REVIEW
Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag: A Biography. Trans. David Dollenmayer
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 280 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0810125834
Stephen J. Whitfield
Published online: 3 March 2015# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Susan Sontag personified the public intellectual who was bewitched by full range of art and thought, high culture and low, fiction and film, with a special attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe. This biography, by a German journalist, is a reminder of what one voracious critic could accomplish, especially in the form of the learned essay, a vehicle for the exposition of ideas that she mastered.
Keywords Film . Intellectuals . Mann, Thomas . Sontag, Susan
Over eight decades after the founding of Partisan Review, the actuarial tables have closed in upon the contributors who defined a remarkable episode in American intellectual history; and even the New York Review of Books has already celebrated a full half-century of commentary on politics and culture. The personnel who constituted the so-called New York Intellectuals may soon become something of a blur. Was it Irving Howe (who coined that term) or Irving Kristol who drew the right political lessons from their youthful Trotskyism? Was it Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg who coined the term Baction painting^? Was Lionel Abel harsher than Daniel Bell in attacking the thesis of Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and was it Dwight Macdonald rather than Alfred Kazin (Bells brother-in-law) who stoutly defended her book? Will anyone be able to identify the Bgreat adversary,^ to whose memory Sidney Hook dedicated Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (1940)? Why did Norman Podhoretz, who
had published excerpts from Paul Goodmans Growing Up Absurd (1960) in Commentary, turnbarely a decade laterso sharply against the left and even his own teacher, the liberal Lionel Trilling? Why would Philip Rahv have trashed Leslie Fiedlers BCome Back to the Raft Agin, Huck Honey!^ (1948), an essay that appeared in the very magazine that Rahv co-edited? Such donnybrooks recede over the horizon and hover near oblivion, as the controversialists themselves may be increasingly difficult to differentiate from one another.
Such is unlikely to be the fate of Susan Sontag (1933 2004), who came across Partisan Review as...