WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHYSelected 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.
