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<div id="title">Christopher Hitchens</div>
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<img class="image" id="image" alt="picture of the hitch" src="http://www.ieturolenses.org/media/wysiwyg/WebsiteTuria/Lecturas/Lecturas16/Abril/hitchens500.jpg"><h1 id="img-caption">"I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information"</h1>
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<h2>Time Line</h2>
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<li>Christopher Hitchens was born on 13th April 1949 in Portsmouth, England to Eric and Yvonne Hitchens. His father was in the British Royal Navy because of which the whole family had to constantly move. </li>
<li>Against his father’s initial will, Hitchens’ mother sent him to Mount House4 School in Tavistock, Devon because his mother wanted him to get education in the upper middle class environment. </li>
<li>Other schools that Hitchens was educated in were Leys School in Cambridge and Balliol College in Oxford. At Oxford he did his major in philosophy, politics and economics. </li>
<li>In 1960, due to his rage over the Vietnam War and the usage of nuclear weapons, rising racism in the west and oligarchy, Hitchens joined politics. He became an active part of the political protests and countercultural movements. </li>
<li>In 1965, Hitchens joined the Labour Party and it was around this time that he formed an interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism through the translated work of Russian revolutionary called Victor Serge. </li>
<li>While still studying at Oxford, Hitchens worked as a correspondent for ‘International Socialism’ which was creatively controlled and published by a set of International Socialists. </li>
<li>In 1971, after graduating from Oxford, he worked as a social science correspondent at the Times Higher Education Supplement, but he was soon fired from there and joined ITV’s Weekend World as a researcher.</li>
<li>In 1973, he joined the New Statesman as a journalist and soon became famous for his aggressive left-winged political views. He met important literary people like Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, etc.</li>
<li>In 1981, while still at the New Statesman, Hitchens went to the Sates under an editor exchange program between his firm and The Nation. He worked there for some time and wrote critical views on American foreign policy, George H. W. Bush, etc.</li>
<li>In 1988, after breaking off the leftist political stance because of the death threats that his writer friend Salman Rushdie was receiving on publishing ‘The Satanic Verses’, Hitchens released his book ‘The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish’</li>
<li>In 1992, while still working officially at The Nation, Hitchens started contributing his work to the Vanity Fair and became a contributing Editor of the magazine. He left The Nation after working there for almost 19 years.</li>
<li>In the later 90s, Hitchens started writing and producing the best work of his career in the form of essays, books and journalistic articles. His usual point of discussion in his work was how some of the public figures were raised to the level of gods.</li>
<li>Around same time, he published ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice’ in which he tainted the unblemished reputation of Mother Teresa claiming that she supported the dictators.</li>
<li>In 1999, he published the book ‘No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton’. It was a critique on the beloved figure of the west, Bill Clinton and his wrongdoings, which infuriated the left.</li>
<li>In 2000s, he got the citizenship of the U. S and became a media fellow at the Hovver Institution. He appeared on talk shows like ‘Frontiers’ and ‘Charlie Rose’ and presented his assertive opinions on politics.</li>
<li>In 2007, he came out with his work called ‘God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’, in which he criticized the existence of all the religions in the modern society. The book established him as an atheist</li>
<li>In 2010, his book ‘Hitch-22’ was published, which was a memoir by him. He took a book tour for its publicity and made an announcement during the same that he had an esophageal cancer. He continued the tour.</li>
<li>In 2011, a collection of his sharp one-liners were published called the ‘The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism’. Another book of his, a collection of critical and political essays, called ‘Arguably: Essays’ was published.</li>
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<h2>Biography</h2>
<p>Born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England, Christopher Hitchens wrote for a variety of English magazines before moving to the United States in 1981. Hitchens established himself as one of the leading intellectual writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, willing to offend his readership with his controversial positions on matters such as religion, art, politics, war and literature. He died in Houston, Texas, on December 15, 2011.
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<p>Hitchens, the son of a commander in the Royal Navy, spent his early childhood in itinerant fashion, with stays in Malta and in Rosyth, Scotland. His mother emphasized education as an entrée into the upper echelons of society. At her insistence, Hitchens was sent to boarding school at an early age, eventually attending The Leys School, Cambridge. In 1967 he enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he joined the International Socialists, a Trotskyist sect. Though an adamant leftist, Hitchens cultivated connections across the political spectrum, a tendency that incurred opprobrium from his more doctrinaire compatriots. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1970 and moved to London, where he wrote for the Times Higher Education Supplement.</p>
<p>In 1973 Hitchens became a staff writer for the left-wing weekly New Statesman and then moved to the Evening Standard. He served as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express (1977–79) before becoming foreign editor of the New Statesman (1979–81). Hitchens moved to New York City in 1981, and the following year he relocated to Washington, D.C., where he penned the column “Minority Report” for the liberal magazine The Nation. During this time he also wrote Cyprus (1984; reissued as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989), an analysis of the role of imperial powers in the 1974 conflicts in Cyprus, and The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (1987).</p>
<p>After death threats were issued against his friend Salman Rushdie in 1989—following allegations about the sacrilegious nature of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988)—Hitchens publicly defended him, citing his right to freedom of expression and excoriating fellow leftists for failing to do the same. A year later Hitchens released The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish and Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, a discussion of the uneven cultural exchange between the United States and England. In 1992 he began writing a column for Vanity Fair magazine.</p>
<p>Hitchens frequently lambasted what he saw as the mythologizing of public figures. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995), he was sharply critical of Mother Teresa, and among his allegations were claims that she supported dictators, including Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier; many of the book’s accusations were featured in the television documentary Hell’s Angel (1994), which he wrote. Hitchens also detailed the various indiscretions of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999) and documented what he perceived as the war crimes of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger in The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001; film 2002). In addition to writing, he appeared regularly as a television commentator and on the lecture circuit, often engaging opponents in political debate.</p>
<p>Hitchens’s later works include Why Orwell Matters (2002), Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005), and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography (2006). With God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) Hitchens issued a rallying cry to the atheist movement; he dubbed the quartet formed by him and fellow atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel C. Dennett “the Four Horsemen of the Counter-Apocalypse.”</p>
<p>After the September 11 attacks of 2001, Hitchens was widely perceived as having migrated to the right on the political spectrum, actively campaigning for the invasion of Iraq and deposal of Ṣaddām Ḥussein and endorsing George W. Bush in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Hitchens dropped his column for The Nation in 2002. He maintained that the shifts in his political allegiances were motivated by the right’s stronger and more-interventionist stance against what he deemed “fascism with an Islamic face.” Hitchens became a United States citizen in 2007, though he retained his citizenship in the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>His memoir, Hitch-22, was published in 2010; during the book tour, Hitchens announced that he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. While undergoing treatment, he continued to make public appearances, during which he discussed his condition and frequently reiterated his religious disbelief in response to suggestions of a possible deathbed recantation. The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, a compendium of his one-liners, and Arguably, a collection of cultural commentary, were released in 2011 prior to his death. Mortality, comprising essays written in the wake of his cancer diagnosis, was published the following year. And Yet…(2015) assembles essays on a wide variety of topics.</p></div>
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<h3>Learn more about Christopher Hitchens <a id="tribute-link" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens" target="_blank">Here</a></h3></div>
<div><h2>Coded by TonyDMorris</div>
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