Celebrity Graveland

January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag was an American novelist and essayist whose criticism covered a wide range of topics throughout the 1960s, ’70s and 80s. Her breakout work was 1964’s essay Notes on ‘Camp’ which popularized “camp” as an aesthetic sensibility. She went on to write Against Interpretation, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor as well as a number of novels and other fictional works. Sontag was also a filmmaker and occasionally directed theatre…including a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a war-torn theatre in Bosnia in 1994. She was a prolific activist who wrote and spoke out about subjects like the Vietnam war, feminism, human rights and the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s.

Sontag was married as a young woman. However, she discovered that she was bisexual in college and maintained a number of relationships with both men and women after her marriage ended. The most notable relationship in her later life was with photographer, Annie Lebovitz. Sontag maintained a love for Paris that stemmed from a trip in her 20s when she followed a dear companion to the city of lights. She spent several months a year in the French capital. Her wish was to be buried there despite dying in New York at the age of 71. She is fittingly memorialized in the same cemetery as Beckett and other notable French writers that she admired.

Burial

Montparnasse Cemetery – Paris, FRANCE

Specific Location

Division 2; Between Allée Chauveau Legarde and the circular path that goes around the center of the cemetery.

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