CULCHA

Christopher Hitchens dies

The rapier literary and conversational wit, masterful political critic, relentless all-night party animal and perhaps the greatest essayist of our time, died on Thursday in Houston, Texas, of complications of esophageal cancer. He was 62. In a career of sterling essays, books, editorials and TV appearances, Hitchens called a multitude of emperors on the absence of their clothes, from British monarchs to Henry Kissinger, from Bill Clinton to God.

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To Wiliam Grimes of The New York Times, Hitchens was “a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell” and “a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.” More in Word

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The Daily Beast: Andrew Sullivan recalls his best memory of Hitchens

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Vanity Fair: His last essay

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Photo: Hitchens 2007: Mark Mahaney for The New York Times