Christopher Hitchens, the journalist, critic, and brilliant rhetorician, died Thursday, a year and a half after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He was 62. Hitchens wrote movingly about his disease and the effects of its treatment on his body and mind, and of how his illness would not shake his atheism. "My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends," Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair this summer, and Juli Weiner writes that Hitchens died in his friends' presence at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The archives of Hitchens' essays for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books.

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Elspeth Reeve