My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. This declaration by Susan Sontag (19332004) seemed to reflect her own life as an essayist, diarist, filmmaker, playwright, and novelist writing on a startling range of topicsfrom literature, dance, film, and painting to cancer, AIDS, and the ethics of war reportage. For many critics, her work captures the twentieth-century world better than almost any other. In this new biography, Jerome Boyd Maunsell draws on Sontag s extensive diaries to offer a far more intimate portrait than ever before of her struggles in love, marriage, motherhood,...