Notes on Sontag
Notes on Sontag (Writers on Writers)
by Phillip Lopate
Phillip Lopate remembers his first encounter with Susan Sontag.
Sontag was already a celebrity in the early 1960s, sometimes referred to as “the intellectual’s Natalie Wood,” when Lopate was an undergraduate at Columbia.
With characteristically frank self-analysis, Lopate admits that, “given [his] fragile would-be-writer’s ego,” he had “an aversion to taking courses with charismatic professors,” and so never studied with Sontag. Despite not being her student, and despite her failure to invite him to join her writers’ group (she did invite a select few …
