A new biography of Susan Sontag is set to claim that the American writer was the true author of her first husband Philip Rieff's seminal work Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.
Out in September, Sontag: Her Life by Benjamin Moser lays out textual and anecdotal evidence that Sontag was not only the unofficial co-author of the 1959 analysis of Freud, which has long been known. Then in her 20s, the celebrated writer and filmmaker collaborated on the book with the sociologist Rieff, whom she married at the age of 17, just 10 days after attending one of his lectures.
Earlier editions of the 1959 book credit her – as Susan Rieff – with “special thanks” in the preface, but by 1961 any acknowledgement of Sontag had been dropped. According to Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliography, their 1959 divorce settlement stipulated she agree to Rieff's claim of sole authorship.
While writing Sontag: Her Life, Moser was given permission by her estate to study the parts of her archive at UCLA that are off limits to the public for the next few decades, and also spoke to friends and acquaintances who had not previously opened up about their relationships with the writer.
Moser acknowledges in the biography that Freud: The Mind of the Moralist is based, at least to some degree, on Rieff's research and notes, but claims: “He almost certainly did not actually write the book upon which his career was based.” Sontag's friend Minda Rae Amiran told him that, while the pair lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Susan was spending every afternoon rewriting the whole thing from scratch”.
