Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, and critic who represents Burke's end-point of the Western polymath tradition — the final name in the subtitle of The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag. Her position there is deliberate: she is the modern exemplar who demonstrates that the polymathic tradition survived the age of academic specialization, though in a changed form.
Sontag's contributions span literary criticism (Against Interpretation, 1966), photography theory (On Photography, 1977; Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003), illness and culture (Illness as Metaphor, 1978), fiction (The Volcano Lover, 1992), political writing, filmmaking, and theater direction. What unites these domains is not a single methodology but a distinctive critical intelligence applied across aesthetic, political, and philosophical territory — the fox mode in practice.
Burke uses her as an example of the modern literary-intellectual polymath, a successor to the 18th-century philosophe. She worked without the institutional habitat of the court or salon, without a patron, and outside the university — demonstrating that the polymathic type had found a new niche in the late 20th century: the independent public intellectual, sustained by book contracts, lecture fees, and cultural visibility.