Writer and columnist Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949 in Portsmouth, England. His parents, Eric and Yvonne Hitchens (née Hickman), met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. He attended Cambridge and graduated from Oxford in 1970, reading in philosophy, politics and economics. From 1971-81 he worked as a book reviewer for The Times of London.
When Hitchens was 23, his mother committed suicide in Athens in a pact with her lover, defrocked clergyman Timothy Bryan. They overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub.
In 1981 he emigrated to the U.S., becoming a citizen in 2007. He wrote "Minority Report," a column for The Nation, from 1982-2002. He then wrote for Slate, The Daily Mirror, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, Harper's and several other publications. As a foreign correspondent, he covered events in 60 countries on all five continents. In "Papal Power: John Paul II's other legacy" (Slate, April 1, 2005), Hitchens pointed out that the pope "was a part of the cover up and obstruction of justice that allowed the child-rape scandal to continue for so long." Mortality, a collection of seven of his Vanity Fair essays about his fatal illness, was published posthumously in 2012.
Hitchens wrote over 30 books, including The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995), God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010). His pro-Iraq War views and his criticisms of President Bill Clinton made Hitchens increasingly controversial among progressives, but he remained a stalwart iconoclast. He told a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. interviewer (May 14, 2007) that he was an “anti-theist” more than an atheist: “You could be an atheist and wish that the belief was true. ... An anti-theist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who’s very relieved that there’s no evidence for this proposition.” But he also identified as an atheist and a secular Jew (on his mother's side).
He married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981. They had a son, Alexander, and a daughter, Sophia, before divorcing in 1989. In 1991 he married screenwriter Carol Blue in a ceremony in the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation. They had a daughter together, Antonia.
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia in 2011 at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston after being diagnosed in 2010 with esophageal cancer. He was the recipient of FFRF's Emperor Has No Clothes Award in 2007 and served as an honorary director until his death. D. 2011.

Source: [ffrf.org]...