Christopher Hitchens

At 62 years old, Christopher Hitchens has this physical status:

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – December 15, 2011) was an English-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, reporter, and social critic.

Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays on culture, politics, and literature.

His confrontational style of discussion made him both a heralded public intellectual and a controversial public figure.

He contributed to The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Free Inquiry, and Vanity Fair. He broke from the political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Satanic Verses scandal, as well as the anti-war movement's opposition to NATO involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.

He was also dissatisfied with the Iraq War's support.

Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, and Diana, Princess of Wales, are among his writings.

He was Peter Hitchens' elder brother. He regarded all faiths as false, harmful, and authoritarian.

He argued in favour of free expression and scientific discovery, and that it was superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilization.

He also called for the separation of church and state.

Hitchens' razor has been dubbed "What can be said without evidence can be dismissed without proof."

Personal life

Hitchens was raised nominally Christian and attended Christian boarding schools, but he stopped participating in communal prayers from an early age. Hitchens later discovered that he was of Jewish descent on his mother's side and that his Jewish ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland). Hitchens was married twice, first to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981; the couple had a son Alexander and a daughter Sophia.

In 1991, Hitchens married Carol Blue, an American screenwriter, in a marriage that took place at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation. Antonia and Antonia had a daughter together. Hitchens discussed reading, writing, and public speaking not as a job or career but as "what I am, who I am, [and] what I love."

In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens, with her lover, Timothy Bryan, a defrocked clergyman. Bryan cut his wrists in the bathtub after the pair overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms. Hitchens travelled alone to Athens to retrieve his mother's body, initially under the assumption that she had been murdered.

He became an American citizen in 2007, despite retaining his UK citizenship.

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Life and career

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the elder of two boys; his brother, Peter, became a socially democratic journalist. Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909-1987) and Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman) both lived in Scotland during World War II. His mother was a Wren, a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service. She was of Jewish origin (Christopher and his brother were 1/32 ethnically Jewish), something Hitchens learned when he was 38 years old; she came to identify as a Jew.

Eric was often referred to as simply "the commander." Eric was sent to HMS Jamaica, which participated in the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape on December 26, 1943. "Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I've ever done." Eric's naval career required him to change base across Britain and its colonies, including Malta, where Peter Hitchens was born in Sliema in 1951. Eric continued to work as a bookkeeper for boatbuilders, speedboat-manufacturers, and a prep school.

Hitchens attended two independent schools—Mount House School in Tavistock, Devon, from the age of eight, and Cambridge's Leys School. Hitchens was admitted to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1967, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and was taught by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny. He earned his third-class degree in 1970. He was "bowled over" by Richard Llewell's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Thought and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's analysis of Capitalism and George Orwell's works in his youth, as well as George Orwell's biography on Religion and Capitalism. He appeared on the television quiz show University Challenge in 1968.

Hitchens departed from the political left in the 1960s, owing to intractability over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, bigotry, and oligarchy, including "the uncountable corporation." He expressed his sympathy with the politically charged countercultural and resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s. "In my cohort, we were marginally anti-hedonistic," he said, "making it much more possible for police provocation to occur," he said. After reading a piece by James Cameron, Hitchens was inspired to become a journalist.

Hitchens was bisexual throughout his youth and joked that as he aged, his appearance "declined to the point where only women would go to bed with [him]. He said he had sexual relations with two male students at Oxford who would later become Tory ministers during Margaret Thatcher's premiership, but he refused to reveal their names in a public manner.

Hitchens joined the Labour Party in 1965, but the majority of the Labour party's group was dismissed in 1967 due to Hitchens' "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's disapproving of the war in Vietnam." Hitchens, a writer who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge Serge's memoirs, developed an ideological interest in Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist socialism under his influence. He joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect" shortly after.

Hitchens began as a correspondent for the journal International Socialism, which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was largely Trotskyist, but it differed from more orthodox Trotskyist parties in that it refused to protect communist states as "workers' states." Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism."

Hitchens began working at the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1971 after spending a year in the United States on a scholarship. Hitchens was fired after six months of service. He was next a researcher for ITV's Weekend World.

Hitchens went to work for the New Statesman in 1973, where his coworkers included Martin Amis, whom he briefly met at Oxford, as well as Julian Barnes and James Fenton, with whom he had shared a house in Oxford. "Handsome, festive [and] gauntly left-wing," Amis said at the time. About that time, the Friday lunches began, and writers such as Clive James, Ian McEwan, Kingsley Amis, Terence Kilmartin, Robert Conquest, Al Alvarez, Russell Davies, and Mark Boxer attended them. When working as a war correspondent from places of conflict such as Northern Ireland, Libya, and Iraq, Hitchens earned a reputation as a left-winger.

Hitchens wrote about the military junta's constitutional crisis in November 1973 while in Greece. It was his first best article for the New Statesman. In 1977, Hitchens talked to Argentina king Jorge Rafael Videla, whom he later described as "horrifying." Hitchens, a New Yorker, defected to the Daily Express in 1977, where he became a foreign correspondent. In 1978, he returned to the United Statesman, first as assistant editor and then foreign editor.

In 1981, Hitchens returned to the United States as part of an editor swap between the New Statesman and The Nation. He wrote vehement attacks on Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and American foreign policy in South and Central America since joining The Nation.

Hitchens began contributing editors to Vanity Fair in 1992, compiling ten columns a year. After profoundly disagreeing with other writers on the Iraq War, he left The Nation in 2002.

Hitchens is suspected of being the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character in the 1987 book The Bonfire of the Vanities, but others, including Hitchens, believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete," Anthony Haden-Guest. Hitchens' father died of oesophagus cancer in 1987, the same disease that would later claim his own life. Hitchens became a citizen of the United States in April 2007, although he later stated that he thought of himself as an Anglo-American.

In September 2008, he became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He wrote under the news-and-politics column at Slate. Fighting Words was a newspaper published in Slate.

Hitchens began his journalism career as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia, were among his first wife Eleni Meleagrou's married life. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a child of 1984, has worked in London as a policy researcher. Hitchens continued writing essay-style correspondence from a variety of countries, including Chad, Uganda, and Sudan's Darfur region. He received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1991.

In 1989, Hitchens married Carol Blue in Los Angeles, and the two then married in 1991. At first sight, Hitchens called it love at first sight. Hitchens and Blue, both hard critics of President Clinton, filed an affidavit to the trial leaders of the Republican Party in Bill Clinton's impeachment. They swore that Monica Lewinsky had been described as a stalker by their then friend Sidney Blumenthal. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial, resulting in a hostile exchange of opinion between Hitchens and Blumenthal in the public arena. Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the truth following the publication of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars. The event brought an emotional break for Hitchens, who was openly chastised by colleagues for what they saw as a cynical and ultimately futile act.

Gore Vidal, the American author and polemicist, was expected to speak about Hitchens as his "dauphin" or "heir" before Hitchens' political shift. In a Vanity Fair piece in 2010, Hitchens called Vidal "Vidal Loco," referring to his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories. "NO, C.H." is one of Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22, among the accolades from notable figures, Vidal's endorsement of Hitchens as his replacement is broken out in red and annotated "NO, C.H." Hitchens' strong defense of the war in Iraq earned him a larger audience, and in September 2005, he was ranked fifth on the list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. According to an online poll, the 100 intellectuals were ranked the 100 highest, but the magazines revealed that Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partially due to their respective supporters' publicizing of the election. Hitchens reacted to his position as a hitchens later in several articles regarding his celebrity as such.

Hitchens did not leave his work for The Nation until the 11th of September, saying that the magazine had arrived "that John Ashcroft is a greater threat than Osama bin Laden." The 11 September attacks "exhilared" him, bringing "a war between everything I love and everything I hate" and improving his embrace of an internationalist foreign policy that criticized "fascism with an Islamic visage." Several editors branded him a neoconservative, but Hitchens denied that he was not "a conservative of any kind," and his colleague Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. In his memoir, Hitchens recalls being "invited by Bernard-Henri Lévy to write an article on political reconsiderations for his journal La Regle du Jeu. 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' I gave it the part ironic name: 'Is One a Neoconservative?' Some copy editor put it on the front page as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' This may have been an example of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: It was decided that I was evidently what I obviously was thinking." In fact, he said in a 2010 BBC interview that he "still" thinks like a Marxist" and referred to himself as a "leftist."

In 2007, Hitchens published "Why Women Aren't Funny" in Vanity Fair, one of his most popular papers. He argued that there is less social pressure on women to engage humour and that "women do it play by men's laws." Vanity Fair's over the year's, the journal's tone or premise were all addressed, as well as Alessandra Stanley's rebuttal. Hitchens reiterated his position in a video and written response amid further skepticism.

The National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary" was given to Hitchens' work for Vanity Fair in 2007. In 2008, he was a finalist in some of his columns in Slate but he lost to Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi. Hitch-22 was shortlisted for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. In 2011, he was named National Magazine Award for Columns on Cancer. Hitchens served on the Secular Coalition for America's advisory board and gave the Coalition recommendations on the acceptance and integration of nontheism in American life. Asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named after him in December 2011, just prior to his death.

Hitchens wrote a monthly essay in The Atlantic and occasionally contributed to other literary journals. Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere gathered these essays in one of his books. Orwell's writings against modern critics are both relevant today and historic for his time, as he argues in Why Orwell Matters. Many literary analyses of writers, including David Horowitz and Edward Said, are included in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left in the 2008 book Terror, Iraq, and the Left.

During a three-hour In Depth interview on Book TV, he listed writers who inspired his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, P. G. Wodehouse, and Conor Cruise O'Brien. When asked what the difference between an autobiography and a memoir was, he replied, "Look, everybody has a book inside, which is precisely where I believe it should remain."

Hitchens worked as a visiting professor at the following universities:

Peter Hitchens, a journalist and writer who is two years younger, was Christopher's sibling. Christopher said in 2005 that the biggest difference between the two beliefs is belief in the existence of God. Peter was a founding member of the International Socialist Workers' Party (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party) from 1968 to 1975 (beginning at age 17) before Christopher introduced him to them.

In The Spectator's 2001 article, Peter wrote about Christopher as a Stalinist, the brothers fell out. The brothers were reconciled after the birth of Peter's third child. Peter's review of God Is Not Great led to a public discussion between the two brothers, but no one was touched by it.

On BBC TV's Question Time in 2007, the brothers appeared as panelists, where they disagreed on a variety of topics. They deblogged the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God in the United States in 2008. The two men discussed the essence of God in civilisation at the Pew Forum in 2010. Peter read a passage from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, which Christopher himself had read at their father's funeral.

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