In America 9780141190105

　　'A tour de force...A magical accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and truth.' - Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun '[In America] has an invigorating spaciousness...packed with characters, incidents, and colour, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence.' - Walter Kirn, New York magazine

　　The story of "In America" is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of "Quo Vadis", Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and, Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.

　　Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.