Want fewer ads?

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an English-American author and journalist (or Sage writer) whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became the William S. Hertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He is a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 he was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.

Known for his admiration of George Orwell, Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, his confrontational style of debate has made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatw? calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face."

Identified as a champion of the "new atheism" movement, Hitchens describes himself as an anti-theist and believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens says that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "An antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there’s no evidence for such an assertion." He argues that the concept of God or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.

Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, on 13 April 2007, his fifty-eighth birthday. His latest book, Hitch-22: A Memoir, was published in June 2010. Touring for the book was cut short later the same month so that he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed oesophageal cancer.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Christopher Hitchens", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0