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Christopher Hitchens - Britannica
Christopher Hitchens - Britannica
Christopher Hitchens, in full Christopher Eric Hitchens, (born April 13, 1949, Portsmouth, England—
died December 15, 2011, Houston, Texas, U.S.), 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 century.
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
Christopher Hitchens, 2007.
foreign correspondent for the Daily Express (1977–79) before
Stephen Shepherd—eyevine/Redux
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 con icts in Cyprus, and The Elgin
Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (1987).
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 gures. 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; lm 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.”
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 Ṣaddām Ḥussein
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.
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.
Richard Pallardy
CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Christopher Hitchens
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 11 December 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christopher-Hitchens
ACCESS DATE: January 03, 2020