Sontag served as a prominent role model for feminist activists and left-wing academics during the 1960s Civil Rights era.

• She became political active largely through opposition to the Vietnam War, and her left-wing beliefs played a major role in shaping her life's work.

• In a 1965 symposium for the Partisan Review quarterly magazine, Sontag remarked: "The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."