Best-selling author and Vanity Fair columnist, Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter announced the news on the magazine's site yesterday.
The cause of death was pneumonia, a resulting complication from his battle with esophageal cancer.
In his last published piece for Vanity Fair, "Trial of The Will," Hitchens wrote candidly about his losing battle to the disease:
I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.
In his message, Carter writes:
He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades.
Hitchens was 62-years-old.