See Slate’s full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens. Read Slate’s complete collection of Christopher Hitchens' columns. 
 
 
 
 Here is how I came to hate Christopher Hitchens. Hate—as in envy. 
 
 In the early 1980s, as a twentysomething trying to start a career as a crusading journalist, I was fortunate enough to share an office with Hitchens. It was just the two of us. And one phone line. We were both working at The Nation. He had come to it as part of an exchange program with the New Statesman, a British publication, and had elected to remain in the wonderful and wild New York City of the late disco era. I was an editorial grunt. The magazine was running short on workspace, and we were assigned a small, windowless office on a floor apart from the main offices. These were the days before voice mail—and much else—and we would take phone messages for each other on pink slips of paper from “while you were out” notepads. 
 
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 You can learn a lot about a person by sharing an office—and taking phone messages for him. 
 
 This is how the average day proceeded: I’d arrive in the morning around 9-ish. The phone would soon start ringing—with calls for Hitchens. I’d tell the callers he was not yet available, and they would leave messages: “Tell him, that was a wonderful dinner last night.” Or, “Mick was so pleased to meet him.” Or, “We may all get together again this evening.” Within an hour or so, the nature of the messages would shift to cover plans for lunch that day: “Tell Christopher we’re all meeting at the Spanish place.” 
 
 About this time, Hitchens would saunter in. He’d say hello, turn to the pink slips I had placed on his desk, and return the calls. Did I say this was a small office? We each could hear everything the other said on the phone. He’d first phone his compatriots from the previous evening and review what had transpired. He then would talk to his lunch-mates for the day and arrange the details. Then it would be time … to leave for lunch. 
 
 While he was gone, calls would come in for him with invitations for afternoon drinks. (In those days, youngsters, late-afternoon drinks were practically obligatory in certain journalistic circles. Think of it as Manhattan teatime.) After a, shall we say, longish lunch, Hitchens would stop back in the office and return the calls regarding the pending drinks. Then it was, ta-ta, once again. 
 
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 By now you are getting the picture. But I’m not done yet. After afternoon drinks, the general practice was to return to the office. Upon his arrival, Hitchens would sort through the latest pink slips with phone numbers from his friends, colleagues, and adversaries who had called about dinner plans and after-dinner drinks. (Yes, in those days, after-dinner drinks were a separate stop.) 
 
 Soon, it was time for Hitchens to head out to the dinner engagement. He would start packing up. About now, Elizabeth Pochoda, the literary editor of the magazine, would poke her head in the door. “Christopher, you’re going to have that review of the Disraeli biography for me tomorrow, right?”—a soft touch of menace in her voice. 
 
 “Oh, yes, of course.” And as soon as she had departed, he’d open his desk, rummage through a drawer, and pull out an 800-page biography of the British prime minister. It was clear to me that the book had yet to be opened. He’d tuck the volume into his bag and say goodnight. 
 
 By this point in the day, I knew all his plans for the evening, including the 11-ish rendezvous for cocktails. I wondered how he would be able to read this book and write a review by the next morning. But come the following day—after the calls about the previous night and the calls about the lunch to come had started—he’d trundle into the office, Pochoda would show up, and he’d hand her a 1,500-word essay. And it was—you know the punch line—brilliant. Did I mention this was in the days before computers? Next, it was off to lunch. 
 
 I did learn much from Hitchens, but never how to function in quite this manner. What allowed him to live such a packed life was a trait that any of us would relish: He never forgot what he had ever read or learned. His mind was always expanding. That was a natural gift that few of us possess. He could not teach it. But observing Hitchens practice his craft and thrust and parry with intellectuals almost as sharp as him was as valuable an experience as I could have imagined. It sure beat attending J-school. And I much appreciated his sense of social egalitarianism. I found that few journalists of his stature paid much serious attention to the young wannabes nearby. I recall one particular moment, at some social/literary event, when I heard him utter what at the time seemed to be these improbable words, “Carly, you do know David Corn, don’t you?” (It was that Carly.) She, of course, didn’t. Hitchens, as a journalist and as a colleague, was inspiring. 
 
 In later years, Hitchens and I had our differences. I was not heartened when he provided left-of-center and intellectual cover to the impeachment crusade waged by extremist radicals of the right in the 1990s. And we had words over his support for the Iraq War—including within the pixels of Slate. I wish I could forget the time, a few months into the war, when he assured me, “Wolfowitz has the rats on the run and this will all be over soon.” 
 
 Yet policy and political debates, as important as they are, come and go. Examples remain. Hitchens set one for me. And I know there is no reason to ask him to rest in peace. ||||| illustration by Charlie Powell. 
 
 
 
 Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday at age 62. He will be missed greatly here at Slate, where he wrote the “Fighting Words” column starting in 2002. To honor Hitch, we are collecting tributes from those who knew him best—his friends, colleagues, and fellow writers. 
 
 June Thomas, Hitchens’ editor at Slate 
 
 Editing Christopher Hitchens, who died Thursday at the age of 62, was the easiest job in journalism. He never filed late—in fact, he was usually early, even when he was clearly very sick—and he managed to make his work seem like a great lark. His weekly e-mails always read the same jaunty way: “Herewith. Hope it serves, As always, Christopher.” READ MORE 
 
 Julian Barnes, novelist 
 
 In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety. I gave copies to my friends, including some of those I had worked with until recently on the New Statesman. Most of them acknowledged receipt; most attempted to make the encouraging noises the skinless first novelist needs to hear. But there was no response from the Hitch. READ MORE 
 
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 Jacob Weisberg, Slate Group chairman 
 
 Amazing about Hitchens: his generosity to young people. He sought them out and befriended them. He responded when they called with requests to speak at their college, contribute to a symposium, or stand with any oppressed minority. He hated to say no to anything worthwhile, and cared less about getting paid than anyone I've ever known. After doing unaccountable favors for unimportant people, he named them comrades, which meant welcoming them into his circle of solidarity and acting as if they belonged in his home, with cocktails. READ MORE 
 
 James Fenton, poet and critic 
 
 I asked Christopher not long ago if he had felt, at the time that he made his decision to move to America, that in England there was always something holding him back. He had indeed felt something like this, although I cannot say I always felt it was for good reasons. Christopher, from the time that I knew him at Oxford, was always a brilliant speaker and debater, and in conversation incomparably interesting and engaging. I regularly turned to him before writing on any political subject, for that jumpstart he could administer so well. READ MORE 
 
 Gully Wells, author of The House in France 
 
 Walking down a mossy, medieval alley in Oxford, dressed in preposterous hot pants and high heeled suede boots (don’t ask, it was 1969) with my then-boyfriend, Martin Amis, we ran into two men I vaguely knew—Christopher and James Fenton—coming toward us. We stopped, I introduced them to Martin, we chatted briefly, and we all moved on. 
 
 I like to think that was the beginning of the deep, enduring friendship—actually more of a love affair—between Martin and Hitch that was to last 42 years, longer than either of their marriages. READ MORE 
 
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 Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard law professor 
 
 It is hard to believe it was six years ago that Christopher and I took a road trip to Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home, Monticello. Christopher was to do a talk about his short biography, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, and I was to introduce him. I came down to Washington from New York the night before to stay in his home so that we could set out early and get there at a leisurely place. The pre-trip evening was convivial, with good conversation with Carol and their daughter Antonia, who made occasional appearances. READ MORE 
 
 Jonathan Karp, publisher, Simon & Schuster 
 
 I had the privilege of publishing two books by Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great and Hitch-22. Here are 10 things about him I found particularly admirable: 
 
 1. He didn’t need much editing. 
 
 2. He had good ideas in the shower. That’s where he came up with the title for God Is Not Great. READ MORE 
 
 Andrew Sullivan, blogger 
 
 I could sense it coming. But I couldn't write anything beforehand and I cannot write anything worthy of him now. So I just sat down an hour ago when I heard the news—Aaron told me as he clicked on Gawker—and sat a while and got up to write and then blubbered a bit and, staring at the screen, read through some emails from him. READ MORE 
 
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 David Corn, Washington bureau chief, Mother Jones 
 
 Here is how I came to hate Christopher Hitchens. Hate—as in envy. 
 
 In the early 1980s, as a twentysomething trying to start a career as a crusading journalist, I was fortunate enough to share an office with Hitchens. It was just the two of us. And one phone line. We were both working at The Nation. He had come to it as part of an exchange program with the New Statesman, a British publication, and had elected to remain in the wonderful and wild New York City of the late disco era. I was an editorial grunt. The magazine was running short on workspace, and we were assigned a small, windowless office on a floor apart from the main offices. READ MORE 
 
 
 
 Anne Applebaum, journalist and director of political studies at the Legatum Institute 
 
 “I see you were feeling eeyorish about Macedonia last week.” As far as I recall, those were the first words Christopher Hitchens ever said to me. They threw me completely. What was this new adjective, “eeyorish”? From which language did it derive? READ MORE 
 
 
 
 Fred Kaplan, author and Slate columnist 
 
 I met Christopher Hitchens in the early 1980s, soon after he first moved to America. We were both in D.C. I was friends with a few expat British journalists, who of course were old chums of “the Hitch,” so it was natural that we’d be introduced. READ MORE 
 
 
 
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 Alexander Chancellor, Guardian columnist 
 
 In retrospect it seems obvious that Christopher Hitchens always needed a larger canvas on which to perform in his many roles as a journalist, debater, and public intellectual, but it nevertheless came as a surprise to many in London when this left-wing British Marxist, apparently happily ensconced in the socialist weekly the New Statesman, suddenly took off for the United States in 1981, never to return. READ MORE 
 
 Matt Labash, senior writer, the Weekly Standard 
 
 No secrets are being divulged when I report that Christopher liked a drink every now and then. Preferably now. He wasn’t sloppy about it. In fact, he always seemed in perfect control (I once saw him steer a beach bike through the streets of Key West without spilling his Scotch.) He just liked to keep the machine well-oiled so he could get on to more important things, like liberating oppressed peoples of the world, knocking out his 10,000 words a day, or starting fights with God, assuming there is one, which he doesn’t. In some ways, his affection for drink brought us together, setting in motion my most vivid memories of him. READ MORE 
 
 
 
 Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts 
 
 There was one year, 2003 I think, we kept him onstage all day at Hay. He started on Waugh with Bill Deedes, the model for William Boot in Scoop. He argued the influence of the Congress of Vienna with Eric Hobsbawm for a couple of hours. Instead of lunch, he delivered an extraordinary lecture on Tom Paine and constitutional law. There was a 20-minute Rothmans break. About eight cigarettes. He hadn’t stopped drinking Johnny Walker Black Label at any point from 10 a.m. READ MORE 
 
 Hussein Ibish, writer 
 
 Because Christopher Hitchens was so politically confrontational and devastating to his opponents, the public is largely unaware of his intense personal generosity and kindness. Time and again, he went far beyond the normal duties of friendship. As our mutual friend Michael Weiss aptly puts it, "Friendship was his ideology." READ MORE 
 
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 Victor Navasky, former editor and publisher, The Nation 
 
 I became editor of The Nation in 1978, and one of the first and best things I did that year was to ask, via old-fashioned snail mail, a writer I didn't know, but whose elegant pieces I had been reading in the New Statesman, and everywhere else, since he seemed to be traveling the world anyway, why not write an occasional article forThe Nation? Which he proceeded to do with elegance, wit, and brilliance. READ MORE 
 
 
 
 David Wolpe, rabbi 
 
 My first moments with Christopher Hitchens were interrupted by a man who pointed out that on the back of my book on faith, a reviewer was quoted saying “even Christopher Hitchens might find his heart warmed.” So, the man asked Hitchens, was your heart warmed? Hitchens regarded my book as an enforcer from Men in Black might look at a particularly repellant alien. “Oh no,” he said, “my heart is far too reptilian for that.” READ MORE 
 
 
 
 Peter Pringle, author 
 
 Christopher covered the bloodless Portuguese revolution in April 1974, that brought down the 20th century's oldest fascist regime. He arrived at the Tivoli Hotel in Lisbon ahead of most of us, as usual. (I was then working for Harry Evans'Sunday Times.) As I got out of a taxi, he was standing on the hotel steps. He was wearing a white suit, well, it might not have been a suit, but it was white, and he was puffing on a cigarette. From the top of the steps, he called out, "Hello, comrade. This is a real revo." READ MORE 
 
 
 
 Craig Raine, writer and founding editor of Arté 
 
 Hitch took part in a Vanity Fair debate at the Oxford Union with Sidney Blumenthal and Alan Clark. It was organized by the then editor, Tina Brown. Hitch got to his feet: “I stand before you, without shame, reeking of cigarettes and alcohol …” (The debating topic was public and private morality in politicians.) READ MORE 
 
 
 
 Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue 
 
 This past July, I gave a book party for my friend Gully Wells. Christopher Hitchens—or Hitch, as he was known to me and just about everyone else—came, as did Martin Amis and James Fenton, who were among his closest friends. It ended up being a reunion of sorts. We’d all known each other for a long time; a million years ago, in London, I’d dated Hitch, and Gully had dated Martin. READ MORE ||||| What I'll Miss About HitchensBy Lee Siegel 
 
 The price paid for celebrity is caricature, and by the end of his rich, accomplished life, Christopher Hitchens had become everyone’s lovable curmudgeon. In the pages of publications that once would have nothing to do with him—The New York Times (they didn’t like his anti-Zionism), The New Yorker (they didn’t like his strong opinions)—he was suddenly extolled for exciting copy as “The Contrarian,” “The Drinker,” The Partygoer.” The relentless comparisons to George Orwell made you wince, not because Hitchens didn’t deserve the extravagant praise—in many ways, he did—but because comparisons tend to diminish. He was not someone like Orwell (a comparison he himself nurtured and invited). He was Christopher Hitchens, unique and unduplicable. He was the most distinctive personality in Western literary journalism. If he was like anything, he resembled some larger-than-life 19th-century figura. He was journalism’s Lord Byron. And unlike certain other Washington-based literati, he didn’t spend his professional life hurling thunderbolts from behind the shelter of a title and a desk. He made his own way. Always. 
 
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 Christopher Hitchens's Best LongreadsBy David Sessions 
 
 From his epic takedown of Henry Kissinger to his petty crime spree in Bloomberg’s New York, The Daily Beast picks just a few highlights from Christopher Hitchens’s prolific career. 
 
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 A Man of Passion, Prose and WitBy Stephen Fry 
 
 We shared a love and passion for P. G. Wodehouse and such things form a bond. Wodehouse, who adored the Pekingese breed of dog, liked to judge people on whether they were sound on Pekes. Evelyn Waugh, who like the Hitch and myself, revered the Master, judged people on how sound they are on Wodehouse. 
 
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 Andrew Sullivan's Greatest Hitchens Memories 
 
 Andrew remembers his dear friend and dedicates much of The Dish to celebrating the rich life of Christopher Hitchens, from the best tributes on the web, his favorite memory of him, his finest moments on TV, to an Auden poem Hitch once read to Andrew. Follow the latest on his blog. 
 
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 RIP, Dear FriendBy Andrew Sullivan 
 
 He once wrote to me: "Dearest Andrew I always think of Sunday lunch as beginning at about 2.30 ('a lavish and ruminative feast', as Waugh says about elevenses). Want to come here?" 
 
 Yes, I do, Hitch. Yes, I do. 
 
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 Final Hitchens Memoir Out Next Year 
 
 A final memoir by the late Christopher Hitchens will be out early next year, and will likely be a collection of essays called Mortality. It will include many of his columns for Vanity Fair, and will be released by Atlantic Books, which published his bestselling God Is Not Great, Hitch-22 and Arguably. Hitchens died late Thursday night after battling esophageal cancer. "Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to'do' death in the active and not the passive sense," Hitchens wrote recently in his final column for Vanity Fair. "However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings.” He went on to dispense with familiar principles and maxims, including “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”—a defiant and courageous takedown, to the end. 
 
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 How Will Hitchens Be Remembered?By Jason Crowley, Editor of the New Statesman 
 
 In his final interview, conducted with Richard Dawkins and published in the Christmas issue of the New Statesman, Hitchens spoke of how the one consistency for him in his long, four-decade career as a writer was in being against the totalitarian, on the left and on the right. “The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.” And the ultimate totalitarian was God, against whom (or the notion of whom) he was raging until the end. 
 
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 Hitchens’s Best ZingersChristopher Hitchens’s most valuable asset was his scathing wit. From his famous digs at religion to his humiliating takedown of Sarah Palin—and even some snippy comments aimed at cats—read the brilliant writer’s most incendiary jabs. READ MORE>> 
 
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 Hitchens Articles in Newsweek MagazineThe writer was known for weighing in on all topics—no matter how controversial. From the presidents to religion to foreign policy, see some of Hitchens’ best work for Newsweek. READ MORE>> 
 
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 My Friend and MentorBy Eli Lake 
 
 It is fitting that Christopher Hitchens would die one day after the official ceremonies in Baghdad to end the Iraq war. I befriended Christopher and his family in the fall of 2002 in the run up to that war. I will never forget the evening we met. I had just started dating a woman I nearly married and we returned to a party hosted by one of my editors. There was Christopher, holding court, surrounded by journalists and aspiring intellectuals. Even though that evening the pending war was on everyone’s minds, Christopher wanted to talk about the Balkans. 
 
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 Hitchens In IranBy Roya Hakakian 
 
 I never knew him to take his time, squander words to be merely decorous. He loved or loathed immediately, and he did both as voraciously as he smoked, spoke and drank. 
 
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– There is no shortage of reflections on the life of Christopher Hitchens today, filled with memories and anecdotes that all seem to include the word "cocktail." Writing for Slate, David Corn recounts his "Hitchens tale," one that occurred some three decades ago while the two shared a tiny, windowless office at The Nation. It seems that Corn spent most of his day taking phone messages for Hitchens. In the morning, they'd be along the lines of "'Tell him, that was a wonderful dinner last night.' Or, 'Mick was so pleased to meet him.'" Then they'd shift to invitations for lunch, afternoon drinks, dinner, and an 11pm cocktail date, with Hitchens popping in just long enough to get those messages, then depart for said restaurant or watering hole. At some point, an editor would stop by to double-check that Hitchens would have, say, the review of a biography ready for her tomorrow. He'd say yes, then slip an 800-page book that clearly "had yet to be opened ... into his bag and say goodnight." What he somehow turned in the next day was—"you know the punch line—brilliant. Next, it was off to lunch." Corn writes that he learned many lessons from Hitchens, but "never how to function in quite this manner. What allowed him to live such a packed life was a trait that any of us would relish: He never forgot what he had ever read or learned." It's not a skill that could be taught, but watching Hitchens "practice his craft and thrust and parry with intellectuals almost as sharp as him was as valuable an experience as I could have imagined."