Novelist, playwright and director Susan Sontag will give the Tolles Lecture at Hamilton College on Saturday, April 3, at 8 p.m. in the Chapel. The lecture, titled "Politics and the Arts," is free and open to the public.
The Tolles Lecture was established in 1991 by members of the class of 1951 in memory of Winton Tolles, class of 1928 and dean of the college from 1947 to 1972. It brings to the campus distinguished writers in the fields of literature, journalism and theater to lecture and meet with students.
Sontag's books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; a collection of short stories, I etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and eight works of nonfiction, including Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others. In 1982 FSG published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Sontag's stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America and The Nation, among others. He much anthologized story "The Way We Live Now" (1987) was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties, and in The Best American Short Stores of the Century, edited by John Updike.
Sontag has written and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals, Brother Carl, Promised Lands and Unguided Tour. Her play, Alice In Bed, has had many productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany and Holland.
She has also directed plays in the United States and Europe; her most recent theatre work was a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers' organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Among Sontag's honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the National Book Award for In America (2000) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Sontag received a bachelor's degree from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford.
