The first volume of the diaries of American writer and essayist Susan Sontag (1933–2004), prepared for publication by her son David Rieff, covers her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her subsequent enrollment at the University of Chicago, her meeting with sociologist Philip Rieff, and the birth of her son. A record of the intellectual and emotional coming-of-age of a major American public intellectual, the diary contains lists of books read and films watched during her youth, as well as numerous notes on her favorite authors—André Gide and Thomas Mann; the sixteen-year-old Sontag famously visited the latter at his California home, spending the entire day in a substantive conversation. The diary also includes entries from the year Sontag spent in Paris.