Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an English-born author and journalist. His books, essays, and journalistic career have spanned more than four decades, making him a public intellectual and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, among others, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008.

Known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, among others, his confrontational style of debate has made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native England and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face".

Identified as an exponent of the "new atheism" movement, Hitchens describes himself as an anti-theist and believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens says that a person "could be an atheist and wish that the belief was true," but that "An antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who’s very relieved that there’s no evidence for this proposition." He argues that the concept of God or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.

Hitchens became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, on 13 April 2007, his fifty-eighth birthday, though he retained his British citizenship. His latest book, Hitch-22: A Memoir, was published in June 2010. Touring for the book was cut short later the same month so that he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer.

In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on 14 April 2002, Hitchens says he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter Hitchens took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, that her ancestors had the family name Blumenthal, and were from Poland. His brother has researched the family tree and says they are one-thirtysecond Jewish. His mother Yvonne and father Eric (1909-1987) met in Scotland while both serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, Yvonne a "Wren", a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service, and Eric, a "purse-lipped and silent" imperialistic Navy Commander whose ship (Hitchens claims) had sunk Nazi Germany's Scharnhorst in the Battle of North Cape. His father's Naval career required the family to move and reside in bases throughout the United Kingdom and its dependencies, including in Malta, where his brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.

Due to Yvonne arguing that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it", he was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes, and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley on the plight of Welsh miners, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell. In 1968 he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge. Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22. These experiences spilled over into his college years when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of Margaret Thatcher's government.

In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity to the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.

He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam". Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, translator of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism. Shortly thereafter, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect". Throughout his student days, he was on many occasions arrested and assaulted in the various political protests and activities in which he participated.

He then became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree. His first job was with the London Times Higher Education Supplement, where he served as social science editor. Hitchens admits that he hated the job and was later fired from the position, recalling that "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it."[citation needed] In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman, he acquired a reputation as a fierce left-winger, aggressively attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.