Historically famous critics

Susan Sontag

1933-2004 · American · 20th-21st century

American essayist and cultural critic of art, photography, illness, and modern taste

Susan Sontag was one of the defining public intellectuals of postwar America, a writer who treated criticism as both a moral and an aesthetic vocation. In essays like Notes on Camp and On Photography she reshaped how people thought about art, images, and taste, and in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors she attacked the cruel myths societies attach to the sick. She belongs in a hall of fame of criticism because she insisted that how we see and describe the world carries ethical weight.