Video: On Susan Sontag's Birthday, Here She is Confronting Norman Mailer Over His Use of the Phrase "Lady Writer"

Susan Sontag -- who was born 83 years ago today, on January 16, 1933 -- was one of the foremost literary intellectuals of the 20th century. Among her passions: cinema, photography, foreign affairs, and -- before she herself succumbed to cancer in 2004 -- illness.

Sontag made her way brilliantly through what was still an overwhelmingly male literary world.  Here she is in 1971, at the age of 38, in a famous exchange with Norman Mailer at New York's Town Hall, telling him about one thing she did not want to be called.