BBC News UK 16 December 2011 Last updated at 01:21 ET
Christopher Hitchens dies after battle with cancer (Norman Costa)
"Vanity Fair's editor said those who read him felt they knew him.
"British author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died, aged 62, according to Vanity Fair magazine.
"He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he was suffering from, at a Texas hospital.
"Vanity Fair said there would "never be another like Christopher".
"He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.
"Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar".
""Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
"Mr Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970.
"He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.
"He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and had documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.
"In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: "I love the imagery of struggle.
""I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."
"Prolific writer
"He wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic.
"He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22.
"Arguably, a collection of his essays, was released this year.
""Prospect of death makes me sober, objective."
"Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War.
"He became a correspondent for International Socialism magazine.
"In later life he moved away from the left. Following the September 11 attacks he argued with Noam Chomsky and others who suggested that US foreign policy had helped cause the tragedy.
"He supported the Iraq War and backed George W Bush for re-election in 2004."
I sometimes preface my admiration for Christopher Hitchens' brilliant and incisive writings by mentioning that I did not agree with his stance on the Iraq war. That is not to say that I expect to agree with a public intellectual 100% of the time but that this particular divergence, I did not expect to happen.
Hitchens' autobiography, Hitch 22 is a very readable book - funny, poignant at times and for the most part honest. What struck me greatly about it was that Hitchens, a brash man with a considerable ego that he displayed unabashedly, was also a very faithful friend. His admiration for his close knit group of literary and political pals was fulsome and generous. A memoir is often a venue to brag about oneself. Despite his seeming arrogance and confidence in public, Hitchens does very little of that in his book. Instead, he has much good to say about others.
I will miss Hitchens who had the rare gift of being as effortlessly articulate in speech as he was in his writings. He died as he lived - prodigiously chronicling for our benefit his elation, pain, condemnations and irreverence with an immaculate facility of language. Above all, he was never a bore.
Posted by: Ruchira | December 16, 2011 at 09:41 AM
@ Ruchira:
Your observations and sentiment mirror mine. What a ride! I've used the word "awe" a few times in the past couple of weeks. To use it again seems to overwork the idea. However, I have no other way to express my feelings for his..."rare gift of being...effortlessly articulate...". Just thinking about it makes my jaw begin an involuntary drop.
Before the publication of "God Is Not Great," and when he would lecture on his criticisms of religions, he would reference his own children - with great feeling, I might add - and say that he refuses to allow government, society, schools, churches, whatever, to tell lies to his daughters, especially when he is not in ear shot. He specifically mentioned his daughters. I identified, greatly, with this. I have two daughters of my own, now grown with their own careers and families. Their childhoods and beyond were rife with intruders (family and one-time friends) who did everything they could to compensate for my perceived delinquencies in the orthodox religious indoctrination of my own children - all of it behind my back and in secret.
I understood very well that his message was not about religion, per se, but the right of every human being to decide what their own ideas and beliefs should be, including how they will raise their own children, educate them, and instill values. So much of his passionate delivery was a variation on, "I don't want anyone telling my children that they must believe they are born wretched, sinful, etc., etc."
Those who believe that goodness, faith in your fellow man, and spirituality presuppose belief in a personal, supernatural deity (even if those Godless heathens aren't aware of it) cannot fathom Hitchens' very human sentiments of the transcendent, and the numinous, and how meaningful they were to him. To many of Hitch's critics, his regard for the King James bible (what it meant for the consolidation and development of the English language, the preservation of ancient sacred literature, and as a repository of different manifestations of the human psyche) just didn't compute.
And OH!, what a great writer!
Posted by: Norman Costa | December 16, 2011 at 03:32 PM
Always thought he had a lot more to offer. Was sad to hear that he passed.
Posted by: Diane Wayne | January 05, 2012 at 03:18 AM