Susan Sontag was a bookish girl from California who decided she wanted to have it all, and did. Her hunger was to know everything. In the 1960's and '70's, her essays on camp and photography made her an icon; her famous white streak made her a celebrity; and, her bouts with cancer a survivor.
In the next thirty years she also became a filmmaker, a playwright, a human rights activist, and a novelist. She's ruminated about the meaning of illness, she's directed Beckett plays in Sarajevo under siege, and she's devoured Kant, Rousseau, Kafka, Henry James - the list of her heavy hitters is endless.
As a young graduate student she said she decided to become a writer because "what [she] really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive."
Now deep into her sixties, Sontag says her best writing is still ahead of her. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
