Key figures: Christopher Hitchens (writer, essayist, critic), Carol Blue (wife), Ian McEwan (friend and eulogist), Martin Amis (friend and intellectual ally)
Summary
Christopher Hitchens, the renowned writer, essayist, and public intellectual, died on December 15, 2011, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston at age 62, from pneumonia — a complication of esophageal cancer. Born April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens became one of the most influential and controversial voices in late 20th- and early 21st-century letters. Known for his incisive wit, eloquent prose, and willingness to challenge orthodoxies across the political and religious spectrum, he authored more than a dozen books and contributed for decades to publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, and Slate. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June 2010 and wrote publicly about his illness in a series of essays for Vanity Fair collected as Mortality (2012, posthumous).
Life and Career
Hitchens read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1970. He began his journalism career at the New Statesman in London before emigrating to the United States in 1981, where he joined The Nation as a contributing editor and later Vanity Fair as a contributing editor from 1992 onward. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen on April 13, 2007 — his 58th birthday — in a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial, a symbolic choice he described as deliberately considered.
His most widely read books include:
- The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995)
- No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999)
- Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
- Why Orwell Matters (2002)
- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) — a New York Times bestseller that sold over 500,000 copies in its first year
- Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010) — published just months before his cancer diagnosis
He held visiting or adjunct positions at institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, and the New School in New York.
Illness and Final Years
Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June 2010, shortly after beginning the promotional tour for Hitch-22. He underwent chemotherapy at MD Anderson and made the decision to write frankly about his illness, producing a celebrated series of essays for Vanity Fair that appeared throughout 2010–2011. He later described the condition as likely linked to decades of heavy smoking and drinking. Despite his illness, Hitchens continued publishing, debating, and giving interviews until close to his death, appearing on television and in print as late as the autumn of 2011.
His final extended essay, “Trial of the Will,” was published in the January 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, composed while he was gravely ill. The essays were collected in Mortality (2012), a slim volume that became one of the most discussed posthumous literary works of the early 2010s.
Intellectual Positions
Hitchens occupied an unusual position in Anglo-American intellectual life — a self-described contrarian who began as a Trotskyist and sympathizer of the left before supporting the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which he defended on anti-fascist and humanist grounds. His political evolution alienated many former allies at The Nation while attracting interest from neoconservatives and hawkish liberals. He remained, however, consistently liberal on social issues, a fierce secularist, and an advocate of the Enlightenment tradition.
His public atheism made him a central figure of the New Atheism movement alongside Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004), and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006) — the quartet sometimes called the “Four Horsemen.” Hitchens conducted high-profile debates with theologians, bishops, and rabbis at venues including the Munk Debates in Toronto and through the Intelligence Squared debate series.
Significance
Hitchens’ death on December 15, 2011, drew tributes from across the ideological spectrum, reflecting the breadth of his intellectual reach. The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Yorker all ran major obituaries. His friend Martin Amis described him as “the greatest living essayist in the English language” — a judgment widely repeated in memoriam. Ian McEwan eulogized him at a memorial in New York in April 2012.
The death came at the height of Hitchens’ public influence. His legacy encompasses not only his published work but a model of the public intellectual as debater, polemicist, and stylist operating outside the academy — engaging simultaneously with literature, history, politics, and theology. His atheism essays remain widely assigned in philosophy and religious studies courses, and God Is Not Great has sold well over 1 million copies worldwide.