Writer Susan Sontag dies

Susan Sontag, one of America8217;s most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died Tuesday of leukemia at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. She was 71.

The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of Notes on Camp, written for Partisan Review and included in Against Interpretation, her first collection of essays, published two years later. Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, Bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti.

Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform. 8216;8216;We live in a culture,8217;8217; she said, 8216;8216;in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.8217;8217;

She was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York and raised in Tucson and LA, the daughter of an alcoholic schoolteacher and a fur trader father who died in China of tuberculosis during the Japanese invasion when Sontag was 5. 8212;LATWP