ON December 28, 2004, prominent American female writer and critic Susan Sontag died at the age of 71 from complications of acute myelogenous leukemia at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York. She learnt that she had breast cancer at the age of 43. After that, her health gradually deteriorated. In March 2003, she was found to have leukaemia and received a bone marrow transplant operation. She struggled against her cancer with an intellectual's verve and reflection during the last years of her life.

Susan Sontag was born in 1933 in New York into a wealthy Jewish family. She was intellectually precocious as a young girl: when she was only 16 years old, she entered University of Chicago to study philosophy, French and literature. Her supervisors were the famous scholars Leo Strauss and Kenneth Burke. Six years later, at the age of 22, she received a Master's degree in philosophy and literature. Then, under the supervision of theological scholar Paul Tillich from Harvard University, she wrote a doctoral thesis. After receiving her doctorate, she went to France to study existentialism. She returned to New York at the age of 26 and began to teach theology at Columbia University.

Sontag began her career as a writer in New York. In 1963, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her first novel, "The Benefactor". "The Death Kit", "The Volcano Lover" and "In America" followed and drew great critical acclaim. She won the 2000 National Book Award for "In America".

Provocative essayist

Sontag's talents went far beyond the field of fiction. Her greatest success came as a critic and essayist. Her transgressive "Notes on Camp", in particular established her fame as an essayist and critic in avant-garde circles. This piece was included in her later collection "Against Interpretation", which became one of her most important works.

Even after being diagnosed with cancer, Sontag did not indulge in despair. The experience of being a patient inspired her - she finished her masterpiece "Illness as Metaphor" in 1978. In 1989 she published "Aids and Its Metaphors" as a sequel. In these two pieces she challenged the social injustice and discrimination hidden behind people's horror of disease.

Like many other intellectuals and writers, Sontag was extremely attentive to politic matters and questions of social justice. She bitterly criticized the Viet Nam War and at the end of the 1960s made a controversial trip to Hanoi. After 911 she published a controversial essay (written in English, but given the German title "Unsere Staerke wird uns nicht helfen" - "Our strength will not help us") in The New Yorker magazine, arguing that the disaster was the result of United States foreign policy. "Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" she asked.

Sontag was an intellectual with a wide range of knowledge and interests. Her works deal with various aspects of social life and popular culture, including photography, music and other cultural phenomena. A photographer herself, she discussed the significance of the medium in "On Photography": "To collect photographs is to collect the world", and "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed."

Chinese audience

Chinese readers were especially fond of this unique woman. From the Xinhua News Agency to many local periodicals, various media mourned her passing.

Sontag's works have been widely disseminated among Chinese intellectuals and college students. The Shanghai Translation Publishing House had published three collections of her essays -"Against Interpretation and Other Essays", "Illness as Metaphor" and "Where the Stress falls in 2003".

Sontag once described herself as a "zealot of seriousness" and as an "obsessed moralist". These titles are suggestive of her special temperament, which was especially attractive to Chinese readers. Cheng Wei, Chinese translator of "Against Interpretation" said that the unruly Songtag impressed Chinese readers since her unrestrained spirit was "the source of her unceasing critical attitude".

Ling Yue, another translator of "Against Interpretation" has released an article praising Sontag's works. He points out that the aesthetic value of these writings is only one of the reasons so many readers like them. In "Against Interpretation", "beyond the aesthetic factors mentioned, the most important reason why this book is always novel for readers is that this book possesses moral beauty. It can also be considered an aesthetic concept mixed with a sense of morality."

A critical attitude and sense of morality constituted Sontag's charming temperament in the eyes of her Chinese readers. According to Zhang Tingquan, the Chinese translator of "Where the Stress Falls", Sontag's unrestrained critical spirit was inspiring for many Chinese intellectuals.

"In the Chinese intellectual tradition, the critical spirit is seldom part of the spiritual world. Susan Sontag shows us the real meaning of the critical spirit. She helps us understand that an intellectual should not accept everything without opposition, but rather advance questions and propose alternate views," said Zhang.

Zhang said that translating Sontag's works was a tough task because of the connotative context involved, but the task had helped him to understand Sontag's thinking better. "In Western societies, most intellectuals are independent and hold a critical attitude to most things. It can be hard to judge whether their attitudes are wrong or right in their details, but their independence has an admirable aspect. Although this small group is only a tiny part of the whole society, their critical attitude helps the society become better and more vigorous."

In Zhang's views, society needs intellectuals, and this group of people needs to be responsible about maintaining the value of justice. Sontag's ideas and activities illustrated this viewpoint. In July 1993, when civil war in the former Yugoslavia led to genocidal atrocities, she went to Sarajevo to direct the drama "Waiting for Godot" to condemn the abuses.

Feng Tao, member of the editorial group in charge of publishing Sontag's works at the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, valued her as "a scholar, a writer, a critic and an outstanding feminist-humanist". The significance of Sontag's ideas and activities not only established her reputation in academic circles, they have also made her a heroine. The title of the People's Daily obituary said it simply: American Critic Susan Sontag, the World Has Lost Her.