No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism, and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.

In conversation with her biographer Benjamin Moser, we discussed what lessons her life and work hold for us as we re-examine capitalism and re-shape our post-crisis economies.

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009.

For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy.

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize.

This session was accompanied by musician-in-residence Benjamin Schlez with his latest project, Tandberg.