UCLA library gets Susan Sontag archive

  The Associated Press Susan Sontag,
writer and intellectual, poses for a photograph at her New York
apartment in August 1992.

By Roopa Raman
Daily Bruin Contributor

The UCLA Charles E. Young Library Department of Special
Collections has acquired an archive of literary works by Susan
Sontag, an extremely accomplished 20th-century novelist, essayist
and director.

Honored with the National Book Award for fiction in 2000 and the
international Jerusalem Prize in 2001, Sontag’s own work in
her personal library has been translated into 28 other languages,
totalling about 1,100 volumes.

The archive purchase is a significant contribution to the the
university, said Victoria Steele, director of UCLA Special
Collections.

“It’s an incredibly important resource because
Sontag has worked in so many different areas intellectually,”
Steele said. “It means that we are serious about building our
collections, and it says that we are interested in competing for
top collections against top universities.”

Though Sontag’s first choice for placement of the archive
was the New York Public Library, she has said the gesture by the
UCLA library has helped her to renew her attachment she once had
with the Los Angeles area.

“It’s a source of some satisfaction that my papers
are going to a place that was a part of my life history,” she
said. “I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is in a
place that I can feel a connection to.”

The archive includes drafts of Sontag’s publications, film
scripts, production notes, 2,500 of her correspondences with
figures such as Joseph Brodsky, Howard Hodgkin and Philip Roth, and
89 holograph notebooks ““ a mix of diaries, workbooks and
commonplace books.

English department chair Thomas Wortham said Sontag is an
individual who has had the most positive influence upon American
intellectual and cultural life over the past 40 years.

“She was one of the most challenging voices, and she
brought the intellect back into public sphere,” he said.
“She made us rethink the way we respond to literature, film
and popular culture. She bridged the academic with the world
outside.”

Sontag was born in New York in 1933 and attended UC Berkeley for
one semester and UCLA for summer school before transferring to the
University of Chicago, where she earned her bachelor’s degree
in philosophy. She did graduate work in philosophy, literature and
theology at Harvard University and St. Anne’s College,
Oxford.

“It’s a great university and has a wonderful
faculty,” Sontag said of UCLA. “It’s a place that
I know.”