Christopher Hitchens

To read Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant, pugilistic essayist and journalist who died Dec. 15 at 62, was to be deeply impressed–envious, if you were a writer–and at some point to be deeply pissed off by him. Maybe Hitchens pissed you off with his devastating attacks on religion, his takedowns of Mother Teresa or his endorsement of the war in Iraq. And maybe he also impressed you with any combination of those or his reflections, after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010, on the approach of death. Maybe he impressed you with a lifetime of political writing that, while it zigzagged across the ideological lines that other people assiduously draw, was singularly dedicated to freedom, the rights of the individual and independence of thought.