Susan Sontag

Sontag made her name as America's most influential public intellectual, publishing landmark essay collections (Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor) that reshaped how a generation talked about culture, illness, and image, while also writing fiction and directing films throughout her career.

In America (2000), her fourth novel, loosely follows the real nineteenth-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska's emigration to America to found a utopian farming commune in California before returning, disillusioned, to a triumphant acting career, narrated with the same essayistic digressions that marked her criticism; it won the National Book Award in 2000, a decision that provoked controversy after passages closely echoing unattributed historical sources came to light.

She continued writing and publishing essays on war, illness, and photography until her death from leukemia in New York in 2004.