The Benefactor is a novel by Susan Sontag published in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Company.
Sontag's first novel, it was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Hippolytus of Athens and his step-mother PhaedraStern, 1963: “the novel as a vehicle for the retelling of an ancient myth.”Flint, 1963: “...her first novel…”
Plot
Reception
In an interview with critic John J. Enck, metafiction writer John Barth dismissed both the novel and its author:
New York Times reviewer Daniel Stern characterizes The Benefactor as a “picaresque anti-novel” and faults Sontag for failing to develop her protagonist, the aging Hippolyte, who existence as a literary figure emerges as little more than an “ambiguous dream.”Stern, 1963: “...a picaresque anti-novel…” And: “None of these activities, however, has any dimensional life. Obviously meant to be emblematic, they are thin as experiences, undeveloped as ideas.”
Reviewer Robert W. Flint at Commentary offers high praise for the novel: “Susan Sontag…has written a Marius the Epicurean for the 1960’s [and] it must be said that she has done so with a rapt and thorough awareness of what she was about.” Flint, 1963
Retrospective appraisal New York Times literary critic Cynthia Ozick honors The Benefactor less for its “sly audacity” and more for its author's aesthetic legacy.Ozick, 2006: “The novel, which reads like an audacious, sly, somewhat stilted translation from the French of a nineteenth-century philosophical memoir…”
Footnotes
Sources Enck, John J. and Barth, John. 1965. An Interview. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1965), pp. 3–14: University of Wisconsin Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207341 Accessed 20 December 2025. Flint, Robert W. 1963. The Benefactor, by Susan Sontag; and Nickel Miseries, by Ivan Gold. Commentary, December 1963. https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-flint/the-benefactor-by-susan-sontag-and-nickel-miseries-by-ivan-gold/ Accessed 21 December 2025. Ozick, Cynthia. 2006. “The Din in the Head.” New York Times, July 2, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/books/chapters/0702-1st-ozic.html Accessed 22 December 2025. Stern, Daniel. 1963. “Life Becomes a Dream” New York Times, September 8, 1963. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-benefactor.html Wasserman, Steve. 2015. Susan Sontag: Critic and Crusader. Los Angeles Review of Books, July 1, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/susan-sontag-critic-and-crusader/ Accessed 22 December 2025.