Friday, December 16, 2011

British-born writer, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died in the age of 62.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be an additional like Christopher".
He's survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a prior marriage, Alexander and Sophia.Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as somebody "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar".
"Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970.He began his career like a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, turning out to be contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.
He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.
In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: "I adore the imagery of struggle.
"I sometimes want I had been suffering in a good trigger, or risking my existence for your good of others, rather than just being a gravely endangered patient."
Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut brief: "It does focus the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you believed it was."
Radicalised from the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Celebration more than his opposition to the Vietnam War.
He became a correspondent for the Socialist Workers Party's International Socialism magazine.

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