Writer, intellectual Christopher Hitchens dies of cancer

Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June 2010 when his memoir, "Hitch-22", climbed to the bestsellers list. He died Thursday.

He wrote about his illness and acknowledged years of heavy drinking and smoking.

The disclosure promoted a flood of mails to the Vanity Fair, to which he contributed for many years.

Hitchens, who was voted one of the top five public intellectuals in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll, admired George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. He created a flutter in the global literary and intellectual circuits with critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, among others.

He courted controversies with his confrontational style of debates. As a political observer, he first shot to fame as a writer in left-wing publications in Britain and then in US.

He began to drift away from the Left in 1989 after what he described as the "tepid reaction" of the western Left to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie.

The Sep 11, 2001, attacks drew him towards an interventionist foreign policy with an international face - and a vociferous denouncement of fascism with an Islamic face.

Hitchens was a radical. In 2007, he made a case against religion in his book, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything".

He argued that his "illness had not changed his mind about religion" and borrowing from playwright Shakespeare, he urged believers not to bother "deaf heavens" with their "bootless cries".

Erudition, a roguish sense of humour and passion for intellectual combat marked his prolific writing.

In addition to Vanity Fair, he was a columnist for the online magazine Slate and
contributor to Harper's, the Atlantic and a number of British publications.

He wrote two dozen books, including highly-regarded biographies of Orwell, Jefferson and Paine.

"I am programmed by the practice of a lifetime to take a contrary position," Hitchens wrote.

On an assignment in Cyprus in 1977, he met Eleni Meleagrou, whom he married in 1981. He left her when she was expecting their second child and married Carol Blue, a freelance journalist.

In addition to Blue, Hicthens is survived by their daughter Antonia; two children from his first marriage, Alexander and Sophia; and a brother, Peter, a conservative columnist for the British newspaper Daily Mail.

Hitchens was born April 13, 1949, in Britain.