Sontag: influential intellectual-writer.(Obituaries)(Susan Sontag)(Obituary)

Author-activist Susan Sontag died Dec. 28 in New York of leukemia. She was 71.

In addition to writing bestselling historical novel "The Volcano Lover;" the influential intellectual wrote plays, made films and played herself in Woody Allen's "Zelig." But her greatest literary impact was as an essayist.

The 1964 piece "Notes on Camp," which established her as a major new writer, popularized the "so bad it's good" attitude toward popular culture.

She also wrote such influential works as "Illness as Metaphor" and "On Photography," in which she argued pictures sometimes distance viewers from the subject matter. Her essays often concerned film and …