There are writers who change your mind. There are writers who change how you think. And then there is Christopher Hitchens, who did both simultaneously while making you feel that the process of having your assumptions dismantled was one of the more enjoyable experiences available to a literate adult.

He was not the most systematic thinker of his generation. He was not the most rigorous philosopher. He was not always right. He was sometimes spectacularly wrong in ways that his critics documented with the same relentless attention he applied to the failures of others.

But he was the finest prose stylist working in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century who chose journalism and polemic as his primary form. The sentence was his instrument and he played it with a precision and a musicality that made reading him, even when you disagreed with him entirely, an experience in how English prose could be made to do things that most writers never attempted.

He drank too much. He smoked too much. He was unfaithful. He changed his political positions in ways that cost him friendships and professional relationships that he had spent decades building. He supported a war that produced catastrophic consequences and never fully accounted for his role in providing intellectual cover for a decision that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

And he faced his own death from esophageal cancer in 2010 and 2011 with a public courage and a literary productivity that produced some of the finest writing of his career in the months before he died.

All of it is part of the story. None of it cancels any other part.

This is the full story of Christopher Hitchens.

Who Was Christopher Hitchens? Early Life and Background

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. He was the elder of two sons born to Eric Ernest Hitchens, a Royal Navy commander, and Yvonne Jean Hitchens, née Hickman.

The family moved frequently during Christopher’s childhood as his father’s naval career required. The peripatetic quality of that childhood produced in him both a comfort with displacement and a hunger for the wider world that stayed with him throughout his adult life.

His father Eric was a conservative man of the English lower-middle class whose defining experience was the Second World War and whose values were shaped by that experience and by the specific version of English patriotism that it produced. The relationship between Christopher and his father was respectful but not close in the way that the relationship with his mother was close.

His mother Yvonne was the central emotional presence of his early life. She was more intellectually curious than his father, more socially ambitious, and more interested in the world beyond the naval postings that defined the family’s geography. Christopher has written about her with a love and an admiration that is evident across his work wherever she appears.

In 1987, Yvonne Hitchens died by suicide in Athens, Greece, in a pact with her lover, a former clergyman named Timothy Bryan. She was 52. Christopher was 38. The discovery that she had been leading a secret life that ended in this way was one of the most significant personal experiences of his life and one that he has addressed in his memoir Hitch-22 with characteristic honesty and evident pain.

He has also revealed, in Hitch-22, that his mother was Jewish. This was information he did not have until well into his adult life. The discovery that he had Jewish ancestry, and his subsequent engagement with what that meant about his identity and his relationship to Jewish history and to Israel, is one of the more interesting threads in his later public life.

School and the Formation of a Contrarian

Hitchens attended Mount House School and then The Leys School in Cambridge before winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, one of the most intellectually prestigious colleges in the university.

The education at The Leys School gave him the classical grounding in English literature and rhetoric that formed the foundation of his prose style. He was an exceptional student not because he was the most disciplined or the most systematic but because he read voraciously, retained comprehensively, and could deploy what he had read with a facility that his contemporaries consistently remarked upon.

At Balliol he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, the degree that has produced more British prime ministers and public intellectuals than any other undergraduate program. He arrived at Oxford as a socialist, shaped by the British left-wing politics of the 1960s that were the natural position of someone of his age and intellectual temperament at that historical moment.

He was a member of the Labour Club and the International Socialists. He was drawn to Trotskyism in the specific way that a certain kind of intellectually serious young British socialist of that era was drawn to it. The Trotskyist tradition offered both a critique of Soviet Stalinism, which distinguished it from the fellow-traveling left, and a commitment to internationalist revolutionary politics that suited his temperament better than the national reformism of mainstream Labour.

He also became one of the most socially prominent students of his generation. He was a member of the Oxford Union, the debating society that is the primary training ground for British public life, and he was already demonstrating the debating skills and the rhetorical confidence that would define his public career.

The friendships he formed at Oxford defined his intellectual life for decades. Martin Amis, the novelist, became one of his closest friends, a friendship that lasted until Hitchens’s death. James Fenton, the poet and journalist. Ian McEwan, the novelist. The generation of British writers who came of age at Oxford in the late 1960s and early 1970s was extraordinary and Hitchens was at its center.

Age and Personal Details

Christopher Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949. He died on December 15, 2011, in Houston, Texas. He was 62 years old at the time of his death.

He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June 2010, the same month that his memoir Hitch-22 was published. He underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment while continuing to write and to appear in public debates and speaking engagements with a frequency that surprised everyone who knew how ill he was.

He died at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the world’s leading cancer treatment facilities, sixteen months after his diagnosis.

He stood approximately 5 feet 9 inches tall. His physical presence was not imposing in the way that some public intellectuals have been physically imposing. What was imposing was his voice, a deep and precisely modulated instrument that he had trained through decades of public speaking, and his eyes, which his friends and interviewers consistently described as bearing an intensity of attention that made you feel you were being read as much as you were being listened to.

He smoked cigarettes and drank scotch whisky with a consistency that his friends regarded with a mixture of admiration and alarm. He regarded the habits with the equanimity of someone who had decided that the pleasures they provided were worth the costs they imposed. He acknowledged, after his cancer diagnosis, that the smoking in particular had almost certainly contributed to the esophageal cancer that killed him.

The Early Career: Journalism and the Left

After Oxford, Hitchens worked briefly for the Times Higher Education Supplement before joining the New Statesman, the left-wing British political weekly that was the most significant home for serious political journalism in Britain at the time.

His years at the New Statesman established the essential features of his journalistic identity. He was a reporter who wrote like an essayist. He was a polemicist who did the reporting. He went to places that other journalists were not going, covered stories that other journalists were not covering, and brought back prose that made those stories vivid in ways that conventional journalistic writing could not achieve.

He covered Northern Ireland during the Troubles. He covered Cyprus during the 1974 crisis. He covered Portugal during the Carnation Revolution. He covered Argentina, Central America, and the Middle East at moments when those regions were generating the stories that mattered most to the left-wing internationalist politics he was committed to.

The internationalism was not performative. He believed genuinely in the solidarity of oppressed peoples across national boundaries and in the obligation of writers and intellectuals to bear witness to injustice wherever it occurred. That belief drove him to places that were dangerous and uncomfortable and to positions that sometimes put him at odds with the left that claimed his primary political allegiance.

The Move to America

In 1981, Hitchens moved to the United States. He took a position at The Nation, the American left-wing magazine that was the natural American home for someone of his political background and journalistic profile.

The move to America was personally and professionally significant. He became an American citizen in 2007, in a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. on the Fourth of July. The timing and the location were characteristic. He was drawn to the American tradition of Enlightenment liberalism, to Jefferson and Madison and the specific version of secular rationalism that the Founders had embedded in the constitutional framework, in ways that complicated and eventually transformed his political identity.

He built a life in Washington D.C. and eventually in Houston. He became one of the most prominent journalists and public intellectuals in the United States, writing for Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor for decades, and for Slate, where he wrote a regular column, alongside his contributions to The Nation and numerous other publications.

Wives and Personal Life

Eleni Meleagrou

Hitchens’s first marriage was to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot woman he met while covering Cyprus in the mid-1970s. They married in 1981. They had two children together. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, known as Alexander, was born in 1984. Sophia Meleagrou-Hitchens was born in 1987.

The marriage ended in divorce in 1989. The specific circumstances of its end have not been extensively documented in verified public sources. What is known is that Hitchens’s relationship with Carol Blue, who became his second wife, developed around the time the first marriage was ending.

He has not written about his first marriage in his public work with the directness he has brought to other personal subjects.

Carol Blue

Carol Blue was an American writer and screenwriter whom Hitchens met in the late 1980s. They married in 1991. Their daughter Antonia was born in 1992.

The marriage to Carol Blue was the central personal relationship of the second half of his life and the one that is most documented in his public record and in the memoirs and accounts of people who knew him during that period.

Carol Blue has spoken and written about their marriage with a candor that reflects genuine love and genuine difficulty simultaneously. Hitchens was not an easy person to be married to. He traveled constantly. He drank heavily. He was capable of the kind of absorbed self-involvement that serious intellectual and creative work sometimes produces in the people who do it.

He was also capable of the specific kind of attentiveness and generosity that people who knew him well describe as the quality that made his friendship and his love genuinely valuable. The gap between his public persona, the confident, combative, seemingly invulnerable polemicist, and his private self, which Carol Blue and his close friends describe as warmer and more uncertain, is one of the more interesting dimensions of his biographical record.

After his cancer diagnosis in 2010, Carol Blue became his primary caregiver alongside the medical team at MD Anderson. She has described that period in interviews with a dignity and a grief that reflects the depth of the relationship.

She has continued to be involved in the management of his literary legacy since his death and has spoken about him at literary events and in interviews with a consistency that reflects ongoing engagement with what he meant rather than the managed performance of a widow maintaining a public estate.

The Infidelity

Hitchens was unfaithful in his marriages. He has acknowledged this in his memoir and in interviews with the specific kind of honesty that characterized his approach to personal disclosure. He did not dress it up or fully account for it. He acknowledged it as a real dimension of his personal biography in the same way he acknowledged his drinking and his other personal failures.

The infidelity was something his friends knew about and that the people who were closest to him dealt with in different ways. It is part of the record and part of the honest accounting of who he was.

The Literary Career: Books That Mattered

The Missionary Position (1995)

Hitchens’s book on Mother Teresa is one of the more audacious things a prominent journalist produced in the 1990s. The book argued that Mother Teresa was not the saintly humanitarian figure of popular mythology but a religious fundamentalist whose primary commitment was to the glorification of suffering rather than its alleviation, whose financial relationships were corrupt, and whose political alliances were with some of the worst authoritarian figures of the twentieth century.

The argument was not without foundation. The conditions in her Calcutta homes were documented by independent observers as inadequate in ways that the available financial resources could have addressed. Her relationships with figures including the Duvalier family in Haiti and Charles Keating were documented.

The book demonstrated the willingness to follow an argument wherever it led regardless of the sacred status of the target that was the defining feature of his intellectual identity. Attacking Mother Teresa in 1995 required a specific kind of courage or recklessness, depending on your assessment of the book’s merits.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001)

Published in 2001, this book argued that Henry Kissinger should be prosecuted as a war criminal for his role in decisions that led to mass civilian casualties in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, and Cyprus.

The book drew on documented historical record rather than on contested interpretation for its core factual claims. The argument that those facts constituted war crimes under international law was more contested. The book was influential in establishing a framework for thinking about Kissinger’s record that has remained in the critical literature and that was validated by subsequent historical scholarship.

Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Written as a series of letters to a hypothetical young person entering public intellectual life, the book is the most direct expression of Hitchens’s intellectual values and his understanding of what intellectual courage and integrity require.

The book argues for the specific kind of contrarianism that he practiced. Not contrarianism for its own sake but the willingness to follow the evidence and the argument wherever they lead regardless of the social and professional costs of the destination.

It is the book most recommended by people who want to understand what Hitchens believed about intellectual life and why he lived it the way he did.

God Is Not Great (2007)

The book that brought him to the largest audience of his career and that established him as one of the central figures of the New Atheism movement alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. The four were collectively referred to in public discourse as the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is an argument that organized religion is not simply false but actively harmful. That it has been the primary source of human violence, oppression, and intellectual suppression across history. That it is an insult to human dignity as well as human intelligence.

The book was a bestseller. It generated enormous controversy. It was praised by atheists and secular humanists as the most eloquent and comprehensive statement of the case against religion available in the popular literature. It was criticized by believers across every tradition it engaged with for caricature, selective reading, and the specific rhetorical unfairness that polemic sometimes produces.

Both assessments contained truth. God Is Not Great is not a work of philosophical theology. It is a polemic. Its strengths are the strengths of polemic. Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of polemic. Its prose is extraordinary.

Hitch-22 (2010)

The memoir published in the same month as his cancer diagnosis is the most personal and the most structurally ambitious of his books. It is not a conventional autobiography. It is a series of reflections organized around the significant people and experiences of his life rather than a chronological account of his biography.

The discovery of his Jewish heritage through his mother’s background. The friendships with Amis, Fenton, and others. The political evolution from Trotskyist to whatever it was he had become by the time he supported the Iraq War. The death of his mother. The specific quality of his relationship with Carol Blue.

The book is imperfect as autobiography because Hitchens was not primarily interested in full disclosure. He was interested in exploring the themes that his life presented for examination. The result is less revealing than a more conventional memoir might have been and more interesting as a literary object.

Mortality (2012)

Published posthumously from essays he wrote during his cancer treatment for Vanity Fair, this is the book that most fully demonstrates the specific quality of courage that his death produced.

He wrote about dying from esophageal cancer with the same prose precision and intellectual rigor that he brought to political polemic. He was not consoled by religion. He did not find faith at the end. He faced the end of his life with the philosophical framework he had built across six decades and he documented that facing in prose that is as good as anything he ever wrote.

The book is short. It is one of the most important documents of secular facing of death in the English language.

The Iraq War: The Most Contested Chapter

In the months following September 11, 2001, Hitchens began a political evolution that cost him the friendships and professional relationships he had built across three decades on the left.

He supported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. He argued for it publicly and repeatedly with the same rhetorical force he had previously brought to left-wing causes. He framed it as a war of liberation against a fascist tyranny, deploying the anti-fascist framework of his Trotskyist formation in support of a military action that most of the left he had belonged to regarded as imperialist aggression.

The position cost him his column at The Nation. It damaged his friendship with several of the people who had been closest to him politically. It aligned him, however uncomfortably, with a Bush administration whose domestic policies he found contemptible and whose intellectual representatives he did not respect.

He never fully recanted. He acknowledged that the execution of the war was catastrophically incompetent. He acknowledged that the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was wrong. He did not concede that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was itself wrong.

The Iraq War position is the most contested dimension of his legacy among people who admired his earlier work. The argument for him is that he applied his anti-fascist principles consistently and that the left’s opposition to the war was in some cases motivated by the same anti-American reflexes he had been criticizing for years. The argument against him is that he provided intellectual cover for a decision that led to catastrophic human consequences and that his framework for justifying it was inadequate to the complexity of the actual situation.

Both arguments have substance. The honest accounting does not resolve neatly in either direction.

Net Worth and Literary Estate

Christopher Hitchens’s net worth at the time of his death in 2011 was not publicly documented in verified financial sources.

His income across his career came from journalism, book advances and royalties, speaking fees, and his Vanity Fair contract. God Is Not Great was a major commercial success that generated significant royalty income. His other books sold well by the standards of serious nonfiction without reaching the same commercial scale.

His speaking fees in the final decade of his life were substantial. He was one of the most sought-after speakers in the American intellectual circuit and commanded fees consistent with that status.

The literary estate has been managed by Carol Blue since his death. His books remain in print and continue to sell. Mortality in particular has sustained commercial performance as a document of secular dying that has no close equivalent in the popular literature.

Estimates of his estate value at the time of death suggest a range of $3 million to $5 million based on known commercial performance and industry context. These figures are not verified.

The Relationship with Peter Hitchens

Christopher’s younger brother Peter Hitchens is a British journalist and author whose political positions are almost diametrically opposed to the positions Christopher held for most of his career.

Peter is a conservative Christian. Christopher was an atheist. Peter opposed the Iraq War. Christopher supported it. Peter is a social conservative on questions of drugs, crime, and public morality. Christopher was a libertarian on those questions.

The brothers appeared together in public debate on several occasions. The debates were watched by people who found the spectacle of two Hitchens brothers arguing with each other from opposite ends of the political spectrum both entertaining and illuminating.

They were not close in the way that brothers who share fundamental values can be close. They respected each other’s intelligence while disagreeing about almost everything that intelligence was applied to.

Peter Hitchens has written about his brother since Christopher’s death with a complexity that reflects genuine grief alongside genuine disagreement. He mourned his brother while continuing to believe his brother was wrong about most things that mattered.

That dynamic, love without agreement, disagreement without contempt, is one of the more honest portraits of sibling relationship available in the public record.

The Four Horsemen and New Atheism

The period from 2004 to 2010 produced a wave of popular atheist writing that was collectively labeled New Atheism by its supporters and critics. The primary figures were Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Hitchens.

Their collective impact on public discourse about religion in the English-speaking world was significant. They moved the argument about religion from the defensive posture that atheism had typically occupied, in which atheists explained why they did not believe, to an offensive posture in which they argued that religious belief was not merely mistaken but actively harmful.

Hitchens was the most rhetorically gifted of the four and the one whose attacks on religion drew most directly on historical and political argument rather than on scientific or philosophical argument. His specific contribution was to document the historical record of what organized religion had done when it had power and to argue that the record was sufficient to condemn the institution regardless of the sincerity of individual believers.

The New Atheism has itself been criticized from multiple directions since its peak period. Some critics argued it caricatured religious belief by engaging primarily with its worst manifestations. Others argued its tone was counterproductive. Others argued that Hitchens in particular was better at attacking religion than at providing a positive account of what secular ethics and secular meaning-making required.

Those criticisms are not without foundation. The New Atheism at its best made arguments that the religious establishment found genuinely difficult to answer. At its worst it produced the same kind of unreflective certainty that it criticized in the religious traditions it opposed.

What Made Him Distinctive as a Writer

The Sentence

Hitchens was a master of the English sentence in the specific tradition of the great English essayists. Johnson, Hazlitt, Orwell, and Mencken are the names most frequently invoked in discussions of his prose lineage.

What distinguished his sentences was the combination of precision and momentum. Each sentence said exactly what it meant to say. Each sentence also moved forward with an energy that made stopping before the end of the paragraph feel like a betrayal of the sentence’s own will.

He had read everything and he deployed what he had read with the naturalness of someone for whom literature was the primary medium of thought rather than an external resource to be consulted. Quotations and allusions appear in his prose with the ease of someone who encountered them in reading and stored them in a memory that was genuinely extraordinary in its retention and retrieval capacity.

The Argument

He was not primarily a philosopher but he constructed arguments with a logical precision that philosophers respected even when they found the premises questionable or the conclusions wrong.

He understood the structure of an argument. He understood which premises were essential and which were decorative. He understood how to anticipate objections and address them within the argument rather than leaving them for opponents to raise.

The argument and the prose worked together in his best writing in a way that made the reading experience feel like being taken somewhere rather than simply being presented with information.

The Courage

The willingness to say uncomfortable things in public, to defend positions that were socially costly, and to do so without the hedging and qualification that social comfort requires was the quality that his supporters most admired and that his critics most disputed.

The courage was real. The positions were sometimes wrong. The combination of genuine courage and occasional wrongness is a more accurate description of his intellectual life than either the hagiographic account of a fearless truth-teller or the critical account of a contrarian who mistook provocation for argument.

Awards and Recognition

Recognition	Details
National Magazine Award	Multiple nominations and wins
Lannan Literary Award	For cultural freedom
Freethinker of the Year	2007
Numerous honorary degrees	Multiple universities
Free Inquiry Humanist of the Year	2011
Vanity Fair Contributing Editor	Decades of association

Timeline of Key Life Events

Year	Event
April 13, 1949	Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
1967	Enters Balliol College Oxford
1970	Graduates from Oxford
1973	Joins New Statesman as journalist
1981	Moves to United States, joins The Nation
1981	Marries Eleni Meleagrou
1984	Son Alexander born
1987	Daughter Sophia born
1987	Mother Yvonne dies in Athens
1989	Divorce from Eleni Meleagrou
1991	Marries Carol Blue
1992	Daughter Antonia born
1995	The Missionary Position published
2001	The Trial of Henry Kissinger published
2001	Letters to a Young Contrarian published
2003	Supports Iraq War publicly
2007	God Is Not Great published
2007	Becomes American citizen at Jefferson Memorial
June 2010	Diagnosed with esophageal cancer
2010	Hitch-22 published
December 15, 2011	Dies at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston
2012	Mortality published posthumously

FAQs: People Also Ask

Who was Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American author, journalist, and public intellectual widely considered one of the finest prose stylists and polemicists of the twentieth century. He was known for his atheism, his support for the Iraq War, his books God Is Not Great and Hitch-22, and his public facing of death from esophageal cancer. He died on December 15, 2011, at the age of 62.

How old was Christopher Hitchens when he died?

Christopher Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949, and died on December 15, 2011. He was 62 years old at the time of his death from esophageal cancer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Who was Christopher Hitchens’s wife?

Christopher Hitchens was married twice. His first wife was Eleni Meleagrou, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia. They divorced in 1989. His second wife was Carol Blue, an American writer, whom he married in 1991. They had one daughter, Antonia. Carol Blue was his primary companion through his cancer illness and has managed his literary estate since his death.

What is God Is Not Great about?

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 argument that organized religion is not simply factually false but actively harmful to human civilization. The book surveys the historical record of what religious institutions have done when they had power and argues that record constitutes a comprehensive indictment of religion as an institution. It became a major bestseller and established Hitchens as one of the central figures of the New Atheism movement.

Why did Christopher Hitchens support the Iraq War?

Hitchens supported the Iraq War in 2003 by framing it as a war of liberation against a fascist tyranny, drawing on his anti-fascist political formation. He argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a totalitarian state that had committed atrocities against its own people and that its removal was justified on humanitarian grounds. The position cost him his column at The Nation and damaged several significant friendships. He never fully recanted though he acknowledged the war’s execution was catastrophically incompetent.

What is Mortality about?

Mortality is a collection of essays Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair during his cancer treatment in 2010 and 2011, published posthumously in 2012. The essays document his experience of dying from esophageal cancer without religious consolation, with the same prose precision and intellectual honesty that characterized his journalism. It is widely regarded as one of the most important documents of secular facing of death in the English language.

Did Christopher Hitchens ever find religion before he died?

No. Christopher Hitchens did not find religion before his death. He maintained his atheism throughout his cancer illness and was explicit about this in his writing and in his public appearances during his treatment. He addressed the question directly in Mortality and in numerous interviews, rejecting the suggestion that illness or approaching death had changed his view of religion’s claims.

What was Christopher Hitchens’s relationship with his brother Peter Hitchens?

Peter Hitchens is Christopher’s younger brother and a British journalist whose political and religious positions are almost diametrically opposed to Christopher’s. Peter is a conservative Christian who opposed the Iraq War. The brothers appeared in public debate together on several occasions and disagreed about most significant questions while maintaining a relationship that Peter has described since Christopher’s death with a mixture of genuine grief and continued disagreement.

Conclusion: What Christopher Hitchens Left Behind

The cancer took his voice first. Literally. The esophageal cancer that was killing him affected the instrument he had used with more precision and more pleasure than perhaps any other feature of his physical self. He wrote about that specific loss with a grief that was more evident than his grief about the larger loss of which it was a symptom.

Then it took the rest.

What it did not take was the work. The sentences are still there. The arguments are still there. God Is Not Great is still making the case it made in 2007 with the same rhetorical force it had then. Mortality is still the most honest account of secular dying available in the popular literature. Letters to a Young Contrarian is still the best statement of what intellectual courage and intellectual integrity require of the people who claim to value them.

The Iraq War position is still contested. It will remain contested. The honest accounting of it does not resolve in his favor. The honest accounting of his overall contribution to English prose and to public intellectual life does not resolve against him. Both things are true simultaneously and neither cancels the other.

He was 62 when he died. He had smoked and drunk his way to a cancer that was almost certainly connected to those habits. He knew it. He said so. He did not pretend otherwise.

He faced what was coming with the philosophical equipment he had assembled across six decades and he documented that facing in prose that would have been extraordinary from a healthy writer working without the specific weight of approaching death giving every sentence additional stakes.

The prose lasted. That is what he would have wanted. He cared about the prose more than about almost anything else. He would have wanted it to last.

It has. It will.

If you want to engage with his work and legacy:

• Read God Is Not Great as the essential starting point for his public intellectual identity
• Read Letters to a Young Contrarian for his most direct statement of his intellectual values
• Read Mortality for the most personal and most moving writing of his career
• Read Hitch-22 for the memoir that is less revealing than it appears and more interesting than most memoirs
• Watch the Four Horsemen discussion on YouTube for the most sustained record of his conversational intelligence
• Read the collected Vanity Fair essays for the journalism at its most polished

The story of Christopher Hitchens ended in Houston in December 2011. The argument about what he meant is still going.

It will be going for a long time yet. That is what happens when the prose is good enough and the positions are contentious enough and the life was lived publicly enough that the questions it raises cannot be answered with a single definitive verdict.

He would have wanted the argument to continue. He always preferred the argument to the verdict.