Essay On Christopher Hitchen

Collin Hakes

Composition

April 26, 2016

Hitchens Research Report

Over the course of history, there have been many great intellectuals. From Epicurus and his riddle to the Chinese philosopher Confucius, there have been very many who have made large impacts on the worlds of science, religion, and philosophy. But none made quite as controversial of an impact as Christopher Hitchens. Christopher Hitchens made a large, albeit controversial, impact on the world in the last 60 years because of his passionate arguments for and against many people and ideas.

Early Life

Christopher Hitchen was born April 13, 1949 in the city of Portsmouth, England. Being the son of a Royal Admiral, he was constantly moving from place to place,(Encylopedia

While there, he decided it would be an amazing idea to write for the Times Higher Education Supplement. This would eventually lead to dozens of writings on various topics. For example, in 1982, a year after moving to America, he began writing a biweekly column for The Nation(Britannica 1.) The most well known of which was the Minority Report, which was about his friend Sidney Blumenthel, who he lambasted for, in his own words, “It’s one thing to exaggerate in your own defense, but another to falsify your own rather cowardly testimony in order to pose as an upholder of the First and Fourth amendments.” And upon discovering this, Hitchens was saddened, and he wrote the article I just quoted to rectify the mistake The Nation had made in praising him prior to the discovery. Furthermore, Hitchens continues to write for The Nation up until the 2000s, where he continued to lambaste and praise many people. However, writing his column wasn’t enough to satisfy the writer’s spirit within, and so he wrote several books, including Cyprus(1984), an inquiry into imperial powers in the mid-1970s conflict in Cyprus, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish and Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies(1990), which was a piece on the unstable cultural exchange between America, land of the free, and England, where