Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a prolific English-American author, political journalist and literary critic. His books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. Recognized as a public intellectual, he was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. Hitchens was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. Christopher Hitchens’ audiobooks: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=72cf442f293aa9c43f5d1803934cd95a&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=christopher%20hitchens%20audiobook
Hitchens in 2007:
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, https://amzn.to/3eu69kT / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. Atlantic Books
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Perseus Publishing. https://amzn.to/32HlWda
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene (author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition. https://amzn.to/318XAJ6
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, Rebecca West (author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition. https://amzn.to/3sKcqkz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens_bibliography
In 2007, Hitchens published one of his most controversial articles entitled “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in Vanity Fair. Relying mainly on anecdotal evidence, he argued that there is less societal pressure for women to practice humour and that “women who do it play by men’s rules”. Over the following year, Vanity Fair published several letters that it received, objecting to the tone or premise of the article, as well as a rebuttal by Alessandra Stanley. Amid further criticism, Hitchens reiterated his position in a video and written response.
In 2007, Hitchens’s work for Vanity Fair won the National Magazine Award in the category “Columns and Commentary”. He was a finalist in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. Hitch-22 was short-listed for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. He won the National Magazine Award for Columns about Cancer in 2011. Hitchens also served on the advisory board of Secular Coalition for America and offered advice to the Coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. In December 2011, prior to his death, Asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named after him.
In 2007, while promoting his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens described the Christian evangelist Billy Graham as “a self-conscious fraud” and “a disgustingly evil man”. Hitchens claimed that the evangelist, who had recently been hospitalised for intestinal bleeding, made a living by “going around spouting lies to young people. What a horrible career. I gather it’s soon to be over. I certainly hope so.”
In response to the comments, writers Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy published an article in Time in which, among other things, they challenged Hitchens’s suggestion that Graham went into ministry to make money. They argued that during his career Graham “turn[ed] down million-dollar television and Hollywood offers.” They also pointed out that having established the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1950, Graham drew a straight salary, comparable to that of a senior minister, irrespective of the money raised by his meetings.
Hitchens was an antitheist, and said that a person “could be an atheist and wish that belief in God were correct”, but that “an antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there’s no evidence for such an assertion.” He often spoke against the Abrahamic religions. In a 2010 interview at New York Public Library, Hitchens stated that he was against infant circumcision. When asked by readers of The Independent (London) what he considered to be the “axis of evil”, Hitchens replied “Christianity, Judaism, Islam – the three leading monotheisms.” In debates, Hitchens often posed what has become known as “Hitchens’s Challenge”: to name at least one moral action that a person without a faith (e.g., an atheist or antitheist) could not possibly perform, and conversely, to name one immoral action that only a person with a faith could perform or has performed in the past.
In his best-seller God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticised by Western secularists, such as Buddhism and neo-paganism. Hitchens said that organised religion is “the main source of hatred in the world.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens
Image: Arkansas Lad, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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