Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes on the left and right and wrote the provocative best-seller "God is Not Great," died Thursday night after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.
Hitchens' death was announced in a statement from Conde Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair magazine. The statement says he died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer.
"There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was atthe bar," said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
A most-engaged, prolific and public intellectual who enjoyed his drink (enough to "to kill or stun the average mule") and cigarettes, he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus and canceled a tour for his memoir "Hitch-22."
Hitchens, a frequent television commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications, had become a popular author in 2007 thanks to "God is Not Great," a manifesto for atheists that defied a recent trend of religious works. Cancer humbled, but did not mellow him. Even after his diagnosis, his columns appeared weekly, savaging the royal family or reveling in the death of Osama bin Laden.
"I love the imagery of struggle," he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity Fair. "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."
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5 comments:
Yet Billy Graham, Rush Limbaugh, and Pat Robertson live
I mourn.
I think this is the first time I cried after the death of a famous person. I've spent hours upon hours watching him debate theologians and religious apologists. He was hilarious and articulate and he always used reason to expose flawed arguments.
Putting his atheism aside, Hitchens was a brilliant thinker who always challenged himself and his audience. He was extremely persuasive, forever changing my opinions on Mother Theresa, and Michael Moore. He was also the only person who ever made me question my stance on the war in Iraq. The world is slightly shittier without him.
Damn it all. He was one of the good guys.
Also it should be noted that Hitchens may have been the greatest trash talker of all time. Better than Mohammed Ali, The Rock, David Spade and Sam Kinison combined. He could decimate people with words.
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