Sharp-witted Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens died Dec. 15 from complications of esophageal cancer. He was 62. Hitchens, an English-born writer, became a contributing editor of Vanity Fair in 1992. “There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar,” said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.”
Hitchens often engaged with politics in his opinionated essays, and he was known for crossing conventional left and right lines. A provocateur who challenged political and moral orthodoxy, Hitchens caused even greater controversy when he published a book in 2007 denying the existence of God. Even after his diagnosis with cancer of the esophagus in 2010, Hitchens continued to write. “So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion,” Hitchens wrote.
