WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the
SPECTATOR TELEGRAPH NEW STATESMAN and FINANCIAL TIMES 'Definitive and delightful' Stephen
Fry 'There can be no doubting the brilliance - the sheer explanatory vigour - of Moser's
biography... a triumph of the virtues of seriousness and truth-telling that Susan Sontag
espoused' New Stateman The definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most
towering figures: her writing and her radical thought her public activism and her private face
Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant mind political activism and
striking image made her an emblem of the seductions - and the dangers - of the
twentieth-century world. Her writing on art and politics feminism and homosexuality
celebrity and style medicine and drugs Fascism and Freudianism Communism and Americanism
reflected the conflicted meanings of a most conflicted word: modernity. She was there when the
Cuban Revolution began and the Berlin Wall came down in Vietnam under American bombardment in
wartime Israel. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was
based exploring the private woman hidden behind the formidable public face. Drawing on
hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from Manhattan to Sarajevo - and
featuring nearly one hundred images many never seen before - Sontag is the first book based on
the writer's restricted archives and on access to many people who have never before spoken
about her including Annie Leibovitz. It is an indelible portrait of one of the twentieth
century's greatest thinkers who lived one of that century's most romantic - and most anguished
- lives.
