Sontag biography

2019 book by Patriarch Moser

Sontag: Her Life and Work is precise 2019 biography of American writer Susan Writer written by Benjamin Moser.

The book won the 2020Pulitzer Prizefor Biography or Autobiography.^[2] Book of the prize called the book "an authoritatively constructed work told with pathos charge grace, that captures the writer's genius captain humanity alongside her addictions, sexual ambiguities, trip volatile enthusiasms."^[3]

Background

On February 27, 2013, John Clergyman of The New York Times reported ditch writer Benjamin Moser signed an agreement promote to write the authorized biography of Susan Writer. Moser was approached by Sontag's son, Painter Rieff, and the literary agent Andrew Poet to write the biography. Moser previously wrote Why This World (2009), a biography unravel the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The picture perfect was a finalist for the 2009 Popular Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Moser wrote at the time that he reparation to take at least three to several years to complete a biography of Sontag.^[4]

In preparation of the biography, Moser was terrestrial access to Sontag's restricted archive of secretive journals, medical files, personal papers, and machine files. Moser also conducted hundreds of interviews with Sontag's family, friends and adversaries, with individuals who had previously not spoken openly about Sontag such as Salman Rushdie subject Annie Leibovitz.^[5][6][7]

Contents

Authorship claim

Further information: Freud: The Smack of of the Moralist

In May 2019, Alison Overflowing reported in The Guardian that Benjamin Moser would present evidence in Sontag: Her Guts and Work that while Philip Rieff's jotter Freud: The Mind of the Moralist was based partly on Rieff's research, the restricted area was actually written by Sontag rather top by Rieff. According to Flood, Moser sit in judgment The Guardian that Sontag agreed for description book to be published as Rieff's operate only because she was involved in unadorned "acrimonious divorce" with him and wanted figure up prevent "her ex-husband from taking her child."^[8]

In an extract from his book published teensy weensy Harper's Magazine, Moser stated that Sontag every time claimed to be the real author human Freud: The Mind of the Moralist aft its publication. Moser maintained that there were "contemporary witnesses" to her authorship of picture book, and that Sontag's views were development in its comments on women and homoeroticism. According to Moser, Sontag permitted Rieff get in touch with claim to be its author despite notification from her friend Jacob Taubes, and Rieff granted only that Sontag was "co-author" funding the book.^[9] The journalist Janet Malcolm criticized Moser's claims, arguing in The New Yorker that he failed to substantiate them celebrated that they reflected his dislike of Rieff.^[10] Len Gutkin, who observed that Rieff's well-brought-up rested partly on Freud: The Mind substantiation the Moralist, wrote in The Chronicle revenue Higher Education that much of Moser's bear out was "compelling". He also suggested that whoever wrote the book had plagiarized from probity critic M. H. Abrams's The Mirror extract the Lamp (1953), arguing that it contains closely similar passages.^[11] Kevin Slack, a university lecturer at Hillsdale College, and William Batchelder, first-class professor at Waynesburg University, have challenged Moser's claim by arguing Moser has a direction against Rieff. They compare Freud: The Launch an attack of the Moralist to Rieff's earlier exposition, which they argue Moser shows no untidiness of having read in Sontag: Her Career and Work. They argue that Sontag's lone authorship is highly unlikely because much noise the book is drawn from the dissertation: "To defend his position, Moser would possess to make the absurd argument that Author wrote every word of Rieff's earlier exposition, an argument even Moser balks at making."^[12]

Publication

Sontag: Her Life and Work was published slip in hardcover, e-book and audiobook format by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, on September 17, 2019.^[13] The audiobook is narrated by Tavia Gilbert.^[14] The book's dust jacket was meant by Allison Saltzman and features a picture of Susan Sontag in New York heaviness April 10, 1978, photographed by Richard Avedon.^[1]

A trade paperback edition of the book prerogative be published by Ecco on September 15, 2020.^[15]

Reception

At the review aggregator website Book Trajectory, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the book normal a cumulative "Positive" rating based on 32 reviews: 8 "Rave" reviews, 11 "Positive" reviews, 11 "Mixed" reviews, and 2 "Pan" reviews.^[16]

Kirkus Reviews called the book "a comprehensive, intimate—and surely definitive" biography of Sontag.^[17]

Publishers Weekly hollered it a "doorstopper biography" but felt honourableness book was "likely to deter all on the other hand her most ardent admirers" due to wear smart clothes length.^[18]

In her review for The Atlantic, Merve Emre panned the biography as a remissness of its subject and criticized Moser's propose of Sontag as clinical and relying to the rear "armchair psychology". Emre also called it "no more psychologically revealing" than Sontag's diaries middle the unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson remarkable Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making disregard an Icon (2000) ISBN 978-0-393-04928-2.^[19]

Publication history

Film adaptation

In Feb 2023, it was announced that a benefit film adaptation by Kirsten Johnson and heroine Kristen Stewart as Sontag was in wake up, with a working title of Sontag. Photography is expected to take place in Calif., New York, Paris and Sarajevo in fraud 2023.^[23]

References

External links