Susan Sontag played an important role in recent US cultural and political history, and her work was widely admired world-wide. She passed away on 27 December 2004, after a long struggle with cancer. An obituary and several recent commentaries follow:

Visit the Susan Sontag Foundation website

Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve
By MARGALIT FOX
December 28, 2004, New York Times

"Susan Sontag, the 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 yesterday morning in Manhattan. She was 71 and lived in Manhattan..."

Sontag and Tsunami
By Rebecca Solnit
Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by TomDispatch.com

"The news of Susan Sontag's death arrived as a single sentence spoken in the opening moments of a radio news program Tuesday morning, and then the program returned to what had been the main story since the day after Christmas: the tsunami and the death toll, then in the tens of thousands, that would continue to rise. It was strange to weigh these two incidents of mortality against each other. Though for some people it would be considered insensitive or irreverent even to do so, one of the things to be appreciated about Sontag, I think, is that she considered everything a proper occasion for more thinking, more analyzing, more writing..."

Regarding the Torture of Others: Susan Sontag's powerful critique of U.S. torture in Iraq

"Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives."...

Finding fact from fiction
Guardian Interview with Susan Sontag
May 27, 2000 The Guardian