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Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an Atlantic contributing editor and a Vanity Fair columnist. More

Christopher HitchensFor nearly a dozen years, Christopher Hitchens contributed an essay on books each month to The Atlantic. He was the author of more than ten books, including A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (2003), Why Orwell Matters (2002), God Is Not Great (2007), and Hitch-22 (2009). He was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and wrote prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek International, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular television and radio commentator.

Hitchens began his career in England, in the 1970s, as a writer for the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. From 1977 to 1979 he worked for London's Daily Express as a foreign correspondent and then returned to the New Statesman as foreign editor, where he worked from 1979 to 1981. Hitchens has also served as the Washington editor for Harper's and as the U.S. correspondent for The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. From 1986 to 1992 he was the book critic at New York Newsday. He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pittsburgh; and the New School of Social Research.

Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970. 

Issue March 2012

The Reactionary

The charming, sinister G. K. Chesterton… More »

Issue July 2011

The Real Mahatma Gandhi

Questioning the moral heroism of India’s most revered figure… More »

Issue June 2011

Red Rosa

The writings of the martyred socialist Rosa Luxemburg give a plaintive view of history’s paths not taken.… More »

Issue May 2011

Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man

How the most exasperating of poets met his match… More »

Issue March 2011

From Berlin to bin Laden

A history of the Baghdad Express illuminates the resilience of politicized Islam.… More »

Issue October 2010

Almost Noble

Tony Blair’s memoir reveals him to be neither a cynic nor an innocent, but a man of some principle.… More »

Issue September 2010

Chosen

The toxin of anti-Semitism isn’t a threat only to Jews. … More »

Issue May 2010

The Dark Side of Dickens

Why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men… More »

Issue April 2010

Lost in the Levant

Kai Bird’s affecting personal history of the Arab-Israeli tangle… More »

Issue March 2010

The Men Who Made England

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a service to the history it depicts, and puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists.… More »

Issue January 2010

The Catastrophist

The haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard… More »

Issue December 2009

The Zealot

Arthur Koestler’s manic intellectual career… More »

Issue November 2009

The Pity of War

Is leading one’s own troops to slaughter ever justified?… More »

Issue October 2009

Cheap Laughs

The smug satire of liberal humorists debases our comedy—and our national conversation.… More »

Issue September 2009

The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards

A new memoir by the politician’s wife shows that the pain of infidelity pales in comparison to the loss of a child.… More »

Issue July 2009

Lincoln’s Emancipation

The cruelty and degeneracy the future president was subjected to in his youth forged his iron will… More »

Issue June 2009

Hemingway's Libidinous Feast

In a restored edition of a great classic, sexual anxiety looms large.… More »

Issue May 2009

The Captive Mind

Edward Upward was one of the only writers of the ’30s to deal with Britain’s elephant in the room—fascism—but his career was forever warped by his communism. … More »

Issue April 2009

The Revenge of Karl Marx

What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis… More »

Issue March 2009

Demons and Dictionaries

A new book dissects Dr. Johnson’s pathologies and despair.… More »

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