her circle . And yet when Susan Sontag : The Making of an Icon appeared , the subtitle was mocked , and its authors dismissed as sensationalizers .
But let ' s back up to the backstory of the biography , to understand how the Sontagists converged to create , as was done to Aldington , an atmosphere of opprobrium meant to suffocate biographical inquiry and make the work of biographers beyond the pale . Only this cliché will do because it suggests so well the idea that unauthorized biographers have strayed from the decent boundaries of their literary betters .
It came as an astounding disruption of Sontag ’ s very literary life when two biographers , my wife and I , wrote to Sontag in March 1996 announcing that we had obtained a contract from W . W . Norton to write her biography . 5 We reminded her of our meeting with her at a literary conference in Warsaw . We explained why the “ time is right for a biography of you .” We singled out her role as public intellectual , her independence and freedom from academic sectarianism , her landmark essays and innovative novels , and the need to write a full-scale life “ which can only be essayed in a biography .” At the time there were only two introductory books that hardly did justice to her evolving sensibility . We did not count on her co-operation when proposing the biography to our publisher , but we would obviously profit from a meeting with her , “ not only to gather information , but to help us evaluate what we learn from other sources .” We conceded that the biography of a living figure cannot be definitive , but we added , “ what biography
5 For more background on the development of our proposal for a biography
of Sontag , see Rollyson , “ Susan Sontag : The Making of a Biography ,” in Rollyson , Female Icons , 94 – 107
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