Christopher Hitchens Biography and latest books by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England. He was born to Yvonne Jean and Eric Ernest Hitchens while they were serving the Royal Navy. Due to his father’s posting in the navy, the family traveled quite a bit. Hitchens’ brother was born in Malta. 

 
Hitchens was educated at the Leys School in Cambridge and then at Balliol College in Oxford and read philosophy, economics, and politics. As a teenager, he was influenced by George Orwell; Richard Llewellyn’s How Green was my Valley, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. He was an antagonist to the Vietnam War, oligarchy, racism, and nuclear arms.

In 1965, Hitchens joined the Labor Party; however he was expelled in 1967. He was arrested several times in political protests while he was at university. He worked for the magazine International Socialism which was run by the International Socialists, the predecessors to the British Socialist Workers Party.

In 1981, Hitchens moved to the US and wrote for The Nation and he wrote critiques of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and American foreign policy in South and Central America. He left The Nation because of his stand on the Iraq War. He wrote a collection of essays titled: Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Later he wrote for the Vanity Fair.

During an interview with Book TV, Hitchens said that he was influenced by P. G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Conor Cruise O\'Brien. His memoir, Hitch 22 was published in 2010. He was married twice and has three children.