Christopher Hitchens facts for kids

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
	Christopher Hitchens, 2007
Born	13 April 1949; Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
Died	15 December 2011 (aged 62); Houston, Texas, United States
Occupation	Author, journalist, activist, pundit
Nationality	British, American
Ethnicity	English
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Genres	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.

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".

Hitchens died of oesophageal cancer.

Books by Hitchens

1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to history: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989.
1990 The Monarchy, Chatto & Windus
1990 Blood, class and nostalgia: Anglo-American ironies, Farrar Straus & Giroux.
1995 The missionary position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice, Verso
1997 The Parthenon marbles: the case for reunification, Verso
1999 No one left to lie to: the values of the worst family, Verso
2000 Unacknowledged legislation: writers in the public sphere, Verso
2001 The trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
2001 Letters to a young contrarian, Basic Books
2008 Christopher Hitchens and his critics: terror, Iraq and the Left. (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press

Images for kids

Hitchens and John Lennox at an "Is God Great?" debate (Alabama, 2009)
Hitchens after a talk at The College of New Jersey in March 2009
Hitchens in 2010
Former British prime minister Tony Blair and Hitchens at the Munk debate on religion, Toronto, November 2010
Christopher Hitchens reading his book Hitch-22