The critic Irving Howe—Jewish, socialist, and reverent toward T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and the other modernist masters of the twenties and thirties—perfectly represented the old style. By the late sixties, he joined Partisan Review founders William Phillips and Philip Rahv in despairing about the trajectory of American politics and culture. Howe believed that his colleagues in the intelligentsia bore a large part of the blame for the culture’s new vulgarity. At the end of that decade, he put down these thoughts in a piece for Commentary called simply “The New York Intellectuals.”

As he looked back on the world of his youth, Howe waxed both nostalgic and dyspeptic. He celebrated the old-world innocence of West Side intellectuals (“the immigrant milk was still on their lips”) and their achievements (“to the minor genre of the essay the New York writers made a major contribution”). But the old intellectuals had run their course and dissolved in disarray—“unhealed wounds, a dispersal of interests, the damage of time.” He lamented that they had been replaced by a younger generation of critics who brought along what they called a “new sensibility.” Although Howe couldn’t precisely define this new sensibility, he knew how to define the new enemy: Its name was Susan Sontag. The essay piled attack upon attack. “Susan Sontag [is] a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother’s patches.” In her writings, Howe argued, old modernist ideas reappeared in swinging-sixties lingo, although she had managed to sap them of complexity and genuine critical edge. She represented a “highly literate spokesman” for those “who have discarded or not acquired intellectual literacy.”

Howe’s ill will sprung from substantive disagreement with her aesthetics. But his harsh rhetoric bears the marks of sharp feelings of betrayal. Indeed, Sontag had initially arrived in New York in 1959 with the hope of joining Howe and the Partisan Review intellectuals, not upending them. Sontag’s friend Steve Wasserman, the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, says that she first discovered Partisan Review as a 14-year-old girl at the International Newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard. “She told me that she took the issue home and found it utterly impenetrable. Somehow she came away with the feeling what these people were talking about was of the most enormous importance, and she was determined to crack the code.” When she moved to the city in her mid-twenties, living as a single mother—by way of Chicago, Boston, and Oxford—she encountered Partisan Review editor William Phillips at a party.

“How do you write a review for Partisan Review?” “You ask,” he replied.

Sontag’s friend William Phillips lamented, “A popular conception of her had been rigged before a natural one could develop.”

“I’m asking.”

She quickly became Partisan Review’s theater critic, a chair formerly occupied by Mary McCarthy, who in many respects was the anti-Sontag, a popular novelist who still hewed to the magazine’s highbrow religion.

Almost every male New York intellectual of a certain age can recount with precision the first time he saw Sontag’s figure, even if it was a fleeting encounter. “I met her at Columbia in the sixties and we exchanged pleasantries,” Victor Navasky told me. Many men can recount such encounters, because for all the books and essays Sontag produced, she was a famous procrastinator, who logged many late nights and turned into somewhat of a downtown party fixture. She became enough of a presence at the Factory that Andy Warhol filmed her in a screen test. Even into her late sixties, she ran the book-party circuit, and would cross the rope line with the likes of Lou Reed and Ethan Hawke. (Sontag once joked that her son, David, spent his childhood sleeping on piles of coats hurled onto beds by her fellow partygoers.) “Susan didn’t turn down invitations,” one friend recalls. In part, she leaped into the scene with enthusiasm as a release from her stifling marriage to Philip Rieff. And in part, she leaped because she hadn’t discovered her social prowess until her twenties. “I remember once walking in Paris,” Sontag’s friend Edith Kurzweil told me. “She said that she hadn’t realized that she was attractive until very late.”

But what made her entry into this world so noisy wasn’t just her physical presence. It was the way she transgressed so many of its first principles. During the fifties, the New York intellectuals, with the critic Dwight Macdonald taking the lead, had protested against the “lords of kitsch” and the conformist mass culture that settled over the country in the postwar years. In addition to hating the “masscult,” they despised “the midcult,” that is, the schlocky art masquerading as high culture—or, in Macdonald’s words, “the enemy outside . . . the swamp.” Macdonald’s venerable target list included the Museum of Modern Art, the novelists James Gould Cozzens and John Steinbeck, as well as magazines like The Atlantic and Harper’s that gave regular aid and comfort to the fifth columnists of midcult. If art wasn’t seriously highbrow, then it wasn’t worth taking seriously. As Sontag later wrote in The New Yorker, she had initially conformed to this sensibility, too. After a fight with her then-husband, Philip, in the mid-fifties, she went to see Rock Around the Clock in Harvard Square: “After the movie I walked home very slowly. I thought, Do I tell Philip that I’ve seen this movie—this sort of musical about kids, and it was wonderful, and there were kids dancing in the aisles? And I thought, No, I can’t tell him that”