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Authors, sign in!Reading the Death of Christopher Hitchens
By Darrell Hamlin on December 17, 2011
Christopher Hitchens died Thursday from complications related to whiskey and cigarettes.
I followed the progression of his mortal illness in the same way I followed his many arguments and criticisms: whenever I came across something he wrote, I read it. In the last year, almost everything I read by Hitchens was about his gruesome, losing battle with throat cancer. With his death approaching, Hitchens was aware that many people were not reading the articles as much as they were just slowing down to get a glimpse of something horrible trapped in highway wreckage. He had enraged quite a few by writing about religion the way he did. If Hitchens was not going to recant on his deathbed to their satisfaction, at least they could assure themselves he was already beginning to writhe in hell.
In those last encounters with his work, I sensed that Hitchens was writing to those who understood him to be, at least on one level, a journalist covering the contemporary experience of death. His final reporting was filed from a combat zone near oblivion, and the deadline was unrelenting.
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posted by Darrell Hamlin on December 17, 2011
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