Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, 2007
Born	Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-04-13)13 April 1949 Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
Died	15 December 2011 (aged 62) Houston, Texas, United States
Occupation	Author, journalist, activist, pundit
Nationality	British, American
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Genre	Polemicism, journalism, essays, biography, literary criticism

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an Anglo-American atheist, writer and debater. He wrote for various magazines including The Nation, Free Inquiry, Slate, and others. He was a supporter of the philosophical movement humanism.

Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduation in 1970, he became a magazine writer. In 1982, he moved to Washington, D.C. In 1988, he learned from his grandmother that his mother was Jewish, but had kept her religion a secret. Hitchens remained an atheist and did not adopt any religious faith. He did not write about his religious views until his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.^[1]

Hitchens tried to write from first-hand experience. To write his essays, he braved gunfire in Sarajevo, he was jailed in Czechoslovakia, and in 2008, he was brutally beaten in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2009, Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded. He wrote in Vanity Fair magazine, "If waterboarding does not constitute torture then there is no such thing as torture".^[1]

Hitchens died of oesophageal cancer.^[1]

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Schudel, Matt (December 17, 2011). "Religious skeptic and acerbic master of the contrarian essay". Washington Post. p. B6.