Christopher Hitchens Biography and Photos

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is a British-born, British and American author, journalist and literary critic. Currently living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens is also a political observer, whose books — the latest being God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything— have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. In 2009 Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in U.S. media."

Hitchens is a polemicist. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, he has more recently embraced some arguably right-wing causes, notably the Iraq War; the war has had the support of some liberal commentators of Hitchens's acquaintance in the UK and Canada. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left-wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. He has, however, stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remains a "democratic Socialist" and appeared on BBC Radio 4's Great Lives the previous year to defend Trotsky. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he calls "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger.

Hitchens is an anti-theist, and he describes himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. He was recently made a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.