In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011. Writer and cultural critic Christopher Hitchens died at the age of 62 from complications of cancer of the esophagus.
“There will never be another like Christopher. A man 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,” said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly. — via Vanity Fair
Christopher Eric Hitchens was born in 1949 — the son of a British naval commander and a navy nurse — and by his own account was trained to join the British elite. He studied at a prestigious private school and then at Oxford, picking up along the way a love of smoking, drinking, politics, philosophy and argument. In 2010, Hitchens reviewed his life’s path on NPR’s Talk of the Nation as he talked about his latest memoir.
“I mean I thought of, at one point, entitling the book Both Sides Now, to describe the various ambivalences and contradictions that I’ve been faced with, or that I contained: English and American, Anglo-Celtic and Jewish, Marxist and — what shall we say — I’ve been accused of being this, accused of being a neoconservative and not always thought of it as an insult; internationalist but in a way patriotic,” he said.