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Christopher Hitchens

1949–2011 · 62 years

A British polemicist who made his career, and his citizenship, American

His father was a Royal Navy commander whose ship helped sink the Scharnhorst, and whom Hitchens called simply the Commander. His mother Yvonne, a former Wren, pushed what money there was into private schools — Mount House in Devon from the age of eight, then the Leys School in Cambridge. He joined the Labour Party in 1965 and was expelled two years later over Harold Wilson's support for the war in Vietnam. At Balliol College, Oxford, he read philosophy, politics and economics, signed on with a Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists, and came down in 1970 with a third-class degree. In November 1973 his mother killed herself in an Athens hotel, in a pact with her lover. Hitchens flew out alone to recover the body.

He arrived in the United States in 1981 on an editor exchange between the New Statesman and The Nation, moved to Washington the following year, and stayed. He wrote for The Nation for two decades, became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in 1992, and later ran the Fighting Words column at Slate. He took American citizenship in April 2007, keeping his British passport. The books ran to 18, among them short prosecutorial volumes on Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa, and god Is Not Great, published that May.

The break came in public and it cost him people. After September 11 he said The Nation had arrived at a position where John Ashcroft was a greater menace than Osama bin Laden, and he left the magazine in 2002. He argued for the invasion of Iraq, endorsed George W. Bush for re-election in 2004, and was widely called a neoconservative. He rejected the label, said he was not a conservative of any kind, and told the BBC in 2010 that he still thought like a Marxist and considered himself a leftist. Noam Chomsky and others on the left broke with him, and readers of two decades went with them. His own qualification arrived in 2008, when he had himself waterboarded for Vanity Fair and reported that it was torture.

On June 8, 2010, on tour for his memoir Hitch-22, he was taken into emergency care in New York. The diagnosis was esophageal cancer, the disease that had killed his father. Seven essays he wrote through it became Mortality in 2012, and his body went to medical research, as he had asked. Larry Taunton's book claimed he had edged toward belief at the end, which Richard Dawkins and David Frum rejected and which Hitchens had disowned in advance. god Is Not Great is still read as either the sharpest polemic of the New Atheism or, per the Financial Times and a shelf of religious scholars, derivative and error-ridden. The Iraq columns are why readers still argue about him.

Lifespan

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Christopher Hitchens's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice book
The case against a living saint 1995
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton book
Written while the impeachment was still running 1999
The Trial of Henry Kissinger book
A prosecutor's brief against a former secretary of state 2001
Why Orwell Matters book
Published in Britain as Orwell's Victory 2002
god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything book
Number one on the New York Times list in its third week and a National Book Award nominee 2007
Believe Me, It's Torture article
Vanity Fair, written after he had himself waterboarded 2008

Life in brief

with age at each point

1967 aged ~18 Goes up to Balliol College, Oxford, and joins the International Socialists The Labour Party had expelled him that year over Vietnam.
November 1973 aged 24 His mother dies by suicide in an Athens hotel He flew out alone to recover the body, at first believing she had been murdered.
1981 aged ~32 Moves to the United States on an editor exchange between the New Statesman and The Nation He settled in Washington the following year and lived there until his death.
1999 aged ~50 Swears an affidavit against Sidney Blumenthal during the Clinton impeachment It ended the friendship and drew heavy criticism from his own side.
2002 aged ~53 Leaves The Nation over the Iraq war He said the magazine had decided John Ashcroft was a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.
April 2007 aged 57 Becomes a United States citizen after 25 years in the country He kept his British citizenship and called himself Anglo-American.
May 1, 2007 aged 58 god Is Not Great is published It reached number one on the New York Times list in its third week.
June 8, 2010 aged 61 Taken into emergency care in New York on the Hitch-22 tour A severe pericardial effusion. Treatment for esophageal cancer followed.
December 15, 2011 aged 62 Dies of pneumonia at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston He was 62. His body was donated to medical research, as he had asked.