Susan Sontag has been a major figure in American intellectual life for over thirty years. Her provocative and exacting writings, engaging a wide range of aesthetic, cultural and political issues, have been the basis of a highly public and controversial intellectual career. This study provides a critical introduction to her essays and fiction, illustrating how her work is shaped by her role as a public intellectual within the New York tradition.

Liam Kennedy presents Sontag as a modernist 'writer-intellectual' who has produced a distinctive critical perspective on such diverse subjects as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography, illness and revolution. The book provides a detailed critical analysis of the poetics and politics of Sontag's intellectual eclecticism.

She is presented as a singular interpreter and exponent of high modernist aesthetics who has built a major body of textual work around her strong 'sense of an ending', a perspective on late modernist culture which unites her diverse interests and spans her essays and fiction.