Susan Sontag was an American author, critic, filmmaker and political activist. She was born in New York as the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt who were Polish/Lithuanian Jews. Her father, who died in 1939 when Susan was five years old, was a fur trader in China, and her mother later moved to California with her daughters, Susan and Judith. In 1945, she married Nathan Sontag and both her daughters changed their surnames.