article , “ For Unauthorized Biographers , The World is Very Hostile ,” had already appeared on October 6 , 1996 , describing our determination to write Sontag ’ s biography . 7
Sontag did her best to thwart her biographers , insisting that the PEN minutes of her presidency not be made accessible to us , even though , as it turned out , a good portion of the minutes were already available in a Princeton University archive . Thomas Fleming , a former president of PEN , was aghast at Sontag ' s actions : ““ We are an organization that stands for freedom-to-write and free access to information . And we ' re defenders of the First Amendment . We try to strike down censorship . The principle is so glaringly obvious .” 8 Meanwhile Sontag continued ( through surrogates ) to put intense pressure on Norton to send her the manuscript . In December 1999 , Martin Garbus , a noted attorney specializing in First Amendment law , called Norton , directly requesting a copy of the manuscript . Norton declined to hand it over , but promised Garbus that he would receive the galleys at the same time they were distributed to reviewers . Garbus then put pressure on our agents , but made no headway with them . In a final desperate act , Sontag ’ s publisher , Roger Straus , called Starling Lawrence , a novelist under contract with Farrar , Straus & Giroux and an editor at Norton . A New Yorker profile of Straus later reported that he had told Lawrence , apropos of the Sontag biography , to “ kill the fucker .” 9 When Lawrence did not do so , Straus promptly dropped Lawrence ’ s forthcoming novel from the FSG list and also urged Andrew Wylie to drop Lawrence as a 7
http :// www . nytimes . com / books / 98 / 11 / 22 / specials / welty-unauthorized . html 8 See Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock , Susan Sontag , pp . 334 – 36 , for a full account of
Sontag ’ s effort to deny access to PEN records . 9 Parker .
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