Susan Sontag Dead at 71
Author, essayist and human rights activist Susan Sontag, succumbed to leukemia Tuesday morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, reports ABC News.com. She was 71.
Sontag's essays American culture brought her to the forefront of the nation's intellectual elite in the 1970's and she has written about art, criticism and illness, wrote several novels and and directed films. She was the recipient of the MacArthur "genius grants" from 1993 to 1996. Recently she had courted controversy for her comments about the 9/11 terrrost attacks in the New Yorker. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a `cowardly' attack on `civilization' or `liberty' or `humanity' or `the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" she wrote.
"In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Sontag is survived by a son, David Rieff and her longtime companion, the photographer Annie Liebowitz.