Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens wielded the English language like a cavalry saber, charging into the most contentious debates of his time with a combination of erudition, savage wit, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for contradiction. Born in Portsmouth and educated at Oxford, he cut his teeth in left-wing journalism, a trenchant critic of American power and the war in Vietnam. His worldview, however, was never tribal; he broke with the left over its apologetics for totalitarianism and became a vocal supporter of the 2003 Iraq War, a stance that bewildered former allies. Hitchens found perhaps his widest audience as one of the 'Four Horsemen' of the New Atheism movement, authoring the blistering tract 'God Is Not Great' and engaging in famously heated public debates with clerics. He wrote with equal venom about figures like Henry Kissinger and the sanctity of Mother Teresa, whom he portrayed as a fanatical friend of poverty rather than a foe. A prolific columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate, he lived a life of relentless argument, fueled by whiskey and cigarettes, until his death from esophageal cancer, which he chronicled with unsparing clarity.