Reborn Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

This first of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. "Reborn" is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America's greatest writers and intellectuals.

SUSAN SONTAG immediately became a major figure of our culture with the publication in 1966 of the pathbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation. She went on to write four novels, including the National Book Award-winning In America, as well as a collection of stories, several plays, and seven works of nonfiction. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

"A fascinating document of Sontag's apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice . . . What slowly emerges . . .  is a sense of Sontag's ferocious will. . . . She wanted to be a writer and would do almost anything to make that happen."--Darryl Pinckney, The New Yorker

"A portrait of the artist as a young omnivore, an earnest, tirelessly self-inspecting thinker fashioning herself into the phenomenon she will be . . . Her journal is her true first book, the story of a woman struggling with her consciousness."--Richard Lacayo, Time magazine

"A revelation . . . As do all the best critics, Sontag gave us new metaphors for how to read and see. Fabulously, surprisingly, Reborn shows she used that skill to understand her own pell-mell life."--John Freeman, NPR.org

"What's fascinating . . . is that the journal reveals and adolescent and, later, a young woman, in whom 'ambition'--in this case, an overpowering yearning to be surrounded by and immersed in literature and culture--vastly outeweighed, and seems to have overpowered, 'sexuality.' As she herself puts it in the last entry of this journal, 'intellectual wanting' was the equal of 'sexual wanting' "--Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Republic