Writer Christopher Hitchens dies at 62
Posted December 16, 2011 9:07 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
American pundit, essayist and author Christopher Hitchens has died of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer.
He was 62.
Hitchens, who was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1992, died Thursday night at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the magazine’s publisher Conde Nast said in a release.
The author of the bestseller God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus, the same disease that killed his father. The disclosure of his illness came just after his memoir Hitch-22 was published.
The charmer and troublemaker “was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter wrote on the magazine’s website. “That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man.”
In the magazine’s June issue, Hitchen wrote, “my chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.”
He is survived by his second wife, author Carol Blue and his three children.
