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| Christopher Hitchens |
Hitchens, who began his career in London and moved to America in 1981, achieved great success with its elegant prose and his views direct and categorical, but at times too arrogant.
Vanity Fair, for which Hitchens worked for the past 19 years, announced that the writer died Thursday, surrounded by his friends in a cancer center in Houston, Texas (south) as a result of pneumonia resulting from a complication of who suffered from esophageal cancer.
In announcing his death on its website, the magazine described as "an incomparable critic, a rhetorician master, an exalted sage, and a bon vivant without guilt."
"Let his 62 years of life lived to console us so vividly many of us will miss him dearly."
Hitchens, who lived in Washington since 1982, was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010 and later underwent chemotherapy.
He learned of his illness soon after the publication of "Hitch-22", a memoir that records his prolific career, which was famous for smoking and drinking while producing countless articles and books.
Hitchens cancer stole her voice and her hair, but do not want to write, so his Vanity Fair column he used to tell his deterioration.
"My greatest consolation in the dying years of living has been the presence of friends," he wrote last June.
Salman Rushdie, whom Hitchens supported when Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie sentenced to death for insulting Islam in his novel "The Satanic Verses," paid tribute to him on Twitter.
"Goodbye, my dear friend. A great voice is silent. A big heart stops beating. Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949 - December 15, 2011," he wrote.
British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who once worked as an intern for Hitchens, the writer said was "all a great essayist must be: exasperating, brilliant, very provocative and yet extremely serious."
"It will be greatly missed by all who value the strong opinions and good writing," said Clegg.
The Catholic Order of the Missionaries of Charity in India recalled that Hitchens, an avowed atheist, he offended many people as possible to that captivated, but said he would pray for his soul despite the aggressive stance of the writer to Mother Teresa Calcutta, founder of the congregation and Nobel Prize winner.
In a 1995 book and a documentary of 1994, Hitchens accused Mother Teresa of being a political opportunist, a friend of dictators and corrupt financiers in exchange for donations. He said the nun had contributed to the misery of the poor with their strong opposition to contraception and abortion.
Hitchens, who wrote a total of 25 books, is not only known for his works against religion, but also political, as the chief diplomat of U.S. President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, whom he called a war criminal for its murderous policies in Vietnam, Chile and Bangladesh.
Although he ended his life in politics being right, Hitchens began in rows from left, working for the magazine Socialist International and later in the New Statesman, which fiercely opposed the war in Vietnam.
But after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, the writer supported an interventionist foreign policy and supported the Iraq war, denouncing what he called "Islamic fascism face."
He is survived by his wife, the American writer Carol Blue, and their three children, two of which are from a previous marriage.
