Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (born April 13, 1949, Portsmouth, England—died December 15, 2011, Houston, Texas, U.S.) was a British American author, critic, and bon vivant whose trenchant polemics on politics and religion positioned him at the forefront of public intellectual life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Hitchens was a vocal atheist, and one of his best-known works is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). He also wrote critically of various public figures, including Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger.

Early life and career

Hitchens, the son of a commander in the Royal Navy, spent his early childhood in itinerant fashion, with stays in Malta and in Rosyth, Scotland. His mother emphasized education as an entrée into the upper echelons of society. At her insistence, Hitchens was sent to boarding school at an early age, eventually attending The Leys School, Cambridge. In 1967 he enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he joined the International Socialists, a Trotskyist sect. Though an adamant leftist, Hitchens cultivated connections across the political spectrum, a tendency that incurred opprobrium from his more doctrinaire compatriots. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1970 and moved to London, where he wrote for the Times Higher Education Supplement.

In 1973 Hitchens became a staff writer for the left-wing weekly New Statesman and then moved to the Evening Standard. He served as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express (1977–79) before becoming foreign editor of the New Statesman (1979–81). Hitchens moved to New York City in 1981, and the following year he relocated to Washington, D.C., where he penned the column “Minority Report” for the liberal magazine The Nation. During this time he also wrote Cyprus (1984; reissued as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989), an analysis of the role of imperial powers in the 1974 conflicts in Cyprus, and The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (1987).

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After death threats were issued against his friend Salman Rushdie in 1989—following allegations about the sacrilegious nature of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988)—Hitchens publicly defended him, citing his right to freedom of expression and excoriating fellow leftists for failing to do the same. A year later Hitchens released The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish and Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, a discussion of the uneven cultural exchange between the United States and England. In 1992 he began writing a column for Vanity Fair magazine.

Hitchens frequently lambasted what he saw as the mythologizing of public figures. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995), he was sharply critical of Mother Teresa, and among his allegations were claims that she supported dictators, including Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier; many of the book’s accusations were featured in the television documentary Hell’s Angel (1994), which he wrote. Hitchens also detailed the various indiscretions of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999) and documented what he perceived as the war crimes of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger in The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001; film 2002). In addition to writing, he appeared regularly as a television commentator and on the lecture circuit, often engaging opponents in political debate.

Hitchens’s later works include Why Orwell Matters (2002), Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005), and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography (2006). With God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) Hitchens issued a rallying cry to the atheist movement; he dubbed the quartet formed by him and fellow atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel C. Dennett “the Four Horsemen of the Counter-Apocalypse.”

Move to the right and health issues

After the September 11 attacks of 2001, Hitchens was widely perceived as having migrated to the right on the political spectrum, actively campaigning for the invasion of Iraq and deposal of Saddam Hussein and endorsing George W. Bush in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Hitchens dropped his column for The Nation in 2002. He maintained that the shifts in his political allegiances were motivated by the right’s stronger and more-interventionist stance against what he deemed “fascism with an Islamic face.” Hitchens became a United States citizen in 2007, though he retained his citizenship in the United Kingdom.

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His memoir, Hitch-22, was published in 2010; during the book tour, Hitchens announced that he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. While undergoing treatment, he continued to make public appearances, during which he discussed his condition and frequently reiterated his religious disbelief in response to suggestions of a possible deathbed recantation. The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, a compendium of his one-liners, and Arguably, a collection of cultural commentary, were released in 2011 prior to his death. Mortality, comprising essays written in the wake of his cancer diagnosis, was published the following year. And Yet…(2015) assembles essays on a wide variety of topics.