Illness As Metaphor

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was born in New York City in 1933. A precocious child, she graduated high school at 15 years old and from the University of Chicago at 18. It did not take her long to make a mark on the cultural and artistic worlds. She published her first novel in 1963 and her first collection of essays in 1966. The latter of these two was Against Interpretation, which is perhaps her most famous publication as it includes two of her most cited essays: the titular “Against Interpretation” and “Notes on Camp.” Beginning in the early 1970s, Susan Sontag wrote a series of essays at the New York Review of Books that were collated and published in her book On Photography (1977). This formula was repeated for this book, Illness as Metaphor, which was published in 1978 after first appearing as essays in the New York Review of Books. 

The book at hand can be seen as coming out of two major wellsprings for Sontag. The first, and most important, is Sontag’s own diagnosis of and subsequent treatment for breast cancer. This sickness is never mentioned throughout the text, but it crucially shifts Sontag’s