First published in 1990, this is the first book-length study of Susan Sontag: essayist and analyst of culture, author of Notes on Camp and "Illness as Metaphor," novelist, reviewer, and filmmaker. It was modernism, and the excitement it created in her, that "rescued" Sontag from childhood in Southern California and sent her abroad in the 1950s. Sohnya Sayres looks into the foundations and directions of Sontag s imposing work and in doing so discovers a unity of design and subject that Sontag has only recently acknowledged to have been an ambition all along. Sayres s Sontag is the "elegiac...