Find Your Next Read: 10 Authors for Admirers of Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was more than a writer; she was a cultural force. With fierce intelligence and moral clarity, she interrogated the modern world, from the ethics of photography in On Photography to the metaphors we use for disease in Illness as Metaphor. Sontag bridged the worlds of "high" art and popular culture, treating both with the same rigorous intellectual energy.

If you admire her courage to tackle difficult subjects and her ability to change the way you see the world, you may be wondering where to turn next. This list is organized by the different facets of Sontag's work, helping you find an author who resonates with the part of her writing you love most.

For Her Work on Photography and Art

• Roland Barthes

  No writer is more directly in conversation with Sontag's work on semiotics and photography than her contemporary, Roland Barthes. While Sontag's On Photography is a sweeping, sociological analysis, Barthes' final book, Camera Lucida, is a deeply personal and poetic meditation on a single photograph of his mother. It explores the emotional pull of images, introducing the famous concepts of "studium" (cultural interest) and "punctum" (personal prick). Reading Barthes alongside Sontag provides a complete picture of modern thinking on the photographic image.

• John Berger

  If Sontag taught us how to think about photographs, the art critic John Berger taught us how to see art in a political context. His landmark 1972 book and BBC series, Ways of Seeing, deconstructed the conventions of Western art, revealing how images are shaped by power, property, and patriarchy. Like Sontag, Berger was a public intellectual who made complex critical theory accessible, forever changing how a generation viewed the art hanging in museums.

• Walter Benjamin

  Sontag’s analysis of images owes a significant intellectual debt to Walter Benjamin, a key figure of the Frankfurt School. His 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," is arguably the most important piece of criticism of the 20th century. Benjamin argued that technologies like photography and film strip art of its "aura," or its unique presence in time and space, fundamentally changing its social and political function. For anyone interested in the theoretical underpinnings of Sontag's work, Benjamin is essential reading.

For Her Moral and Political Clarity

• Hannah Arendt

  For readers drawn to Sontag’s unflinching engagement with moral responsibility, particularly in works like Regarding the Pain of Others, Hannah Arendt is a kindred spirit. A political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, Arendt grappled with the greatest horrors of her time. Her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, is a chilling examination of how ordinary people can become cogs in monstrous systems. Her writing shares Sontag's intellectual rigor and commitment to confronting uncomfortable truths about human nature and society.

• Michel Foucault

  Sontag explored how metaphors of illness shape society; Michel Foucault explored how institutions like prisons, hospitals, and schools exert power over the individual. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the shift from public torture to the subtle, pervasive surveillance of the modern era. His work reveals the hidden power structures that define "normalcy" and control behavior, a theme that resonates deeply with Sontag's critiques of societal norms and power.

• Edward Said

  Like Sontag, Edward Said was a towering public intellectual whose work had profound real-world consequences. His groundbreaking book, Orientalism, exposed how the West constructed a romanticized and often demeaning image of the "Orient" to justify colonial and imperial ambitions. Said’s meticulous analysis of literature and scholarship as tools of power will appeal to readers who admire Sontag’s ability to dissect cultural narratives and reveal their political implications.

For Her Masterful Essays and Cultural Criticism

• Joan Didion

  While Sontag diagnosed the culture from New York, Joan Didion dissected its unraveling from California. A master of the modern essay, Didion’s cool, precise prose captured the anxieties and fragmentation of American life in the latter half of the 20th century. Collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are essential. Though her style is more personal and less overtly academic than Sontag's, she shares a penetrating gaze and an unmatched ability to find the universal in the specific details of a historical moment.

• Camille Paglia

  If Sontag was the controlled, analytical intellectual, Camille Paglia is her fiery, iconoclastic heir. Paglia is a cultural critic known for her provocative and polemical style. Her magnum opus, Sexual Personae, is a sprawling, ambitious survey of Western art that challenges feminist orthodoxy and champions the primal, chaotic forces of paganism. For readers who love Sontag's willingness to make bold, sweeping arguments and challenge conventional wisdom, Paglia offers a thrilling, if often controversial, intellectual ride.

• Judith Butler

  Sontag’s 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" demonstrated her knack for identifying and defining emerging cultural sensibilities. Judith Butler achieved something similar for gender with their 1990 book, Gender Trouble. Butler argues that gender is not an innate essence but a "performance"—a series of acts, gestures, and enactments that construct the social illusion of a stable identity. For those interested in Sontag's more playful, post-modern side, Butler's work is a foundational text in modern critical theory.

• Jean Baudrillard

  Sontag was deeply concerned with the difference between the image and the real. Jean Baudrillard took this concern to its postmodern conclusion. In Simulacra and Simulation, he famously argued that our media-saturated world is now composed entirely of signs and symbols that no longer refer to any underlying reality. We live in a "hyperreal" world of copies without originals. This provocative, mind-bending work will appeal to readers who were captivated by Sontag's explorations of representation and authenticity in modern life.