Susan Sontag, the American author, human rights activist and social critic, has died in a New York cancer hospital, aged 71. (Photo: Yahoo)

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"In America" is the paradigm of Sontag's novel. She have gotten the U.S. National Book Award for this book in 2000. (Photo: Yahoo)

¡¡BEIJING, Dec. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- Susan Sontag, who died Tuesday at age 71 of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, was both the most rarefied and the least predictable of thinkers, drawn to the demands of high art but open to the kick of popular culture.

    Ms Sontag wrote 17 books, which were translated into more than 30 languages. Her fame began with her 1964 essay, "Notes on Camp," which popularized the "so bad it's good" attitude toward everything from Flash Gordon to feather boas. Over the next 40 years, she was immersed in foreign films, the pornographic imagination, silence, science fiction, avant-garde theater and the compatible pleasures of a Rauschenberg painting and the music of Diana Ross and the Supremes.

    She drew criticism in the aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks when she said that the attacks were not cowardly but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."

    Born in New York in 1933, Ms Sontag grew up in Arizona and Los Angeles before going to the University of Chicago, and later Harvard and Oxford. She wrote novels, non-fiction books, plays and film-scripts as well as essays for The New Yorker, Granta, the New York Review of Books and other literary titles.

    In 2003 she was awarded a peace prize in Germany and the Prince of Asturias Prize in Spain. Earlier honors included the U.S. National Book Award for her novel "In America" in 2000.

¡¡  Sontag had an insatiable passion for literature, with thousands of books ¡ª arranged by chronology and language ¡ª occupying, and defining, her New York apartment. She read writers from all over the world and is credited with introducing such European intellectuals as Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti to American readers. Like she told Rolling Stone magazine. "The main reason I read is that I enjoy it."

(Agencies)