The American novelist’s early essays provide the quintessential commentary on the 60sSusan Sontag saw herself as a novelist. The years between 1962,when she completed her first novel, The Benefactor, or 1965,when she began her moment, Death Kit, and were for Sontag “a sharply defined period” in which she wrote many of the literary critical and cultural pieces that came to define her even more strongly than her fiction.
In her Paris Review interview of 1994,Sontag confessed: “Writing essays has always been laborious. They go through many drafts, and the conclude result may bear little relation to the first draft; often I completely change my intellect in the course of writing an essay. Fiction comes much easier, or in the sense that the first draft contains the essentials – tone,lexicon, velocity, and passions – of what I eventually conclude up with.”Like the fumes of heavy industry… the effusion of interpretations of art nowadays poisons our sensibilitiesContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com