In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

He lived to see Osama bin Laden die.

Cancer has taken too many of my favorite people.

I was fortunate enough to meet Christpher Hitchens when he had to step outside of the Waldorf to have a cigarette. We spoke while he relaxed about his becoming an American, the folly of religion and that we both shared the same favorite book he wrote. When I saw him, he had just given a lecture before a CATO Institute gathering. He seemed the opposite of the dishevelled impression reflected through television. He was very neat and well groomed in his tailored cream colored suit, and of course, well spoken, even after standing before a large group for nearly an hour. He was, as always, without a necktie. Christpher Hitchens was a pure gentleman in every sense. ♘

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011 | Blogs | Vanity Fair

full post 12-15-11 by Juli Weiner

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.