page_title: Christopher Hitchens
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Christopher Hitchens / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Christopher Hitchens speaks with a student after an event at The College of New Jersey.
context_page_description: Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English-American intellectual, polemicist, and socio-political critic who expressed himself as an author, orator, essayist, journalist, and columnist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays on culture, politics, and literature.
  A staple of public discourse, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded public intellectual and a controversial public figure. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Free Inquiry, The Spectator, and Vanity Fair.
  As an anti-theist, he regarded all religions as false, harmful, and authoritarian. He argued in favour of free expression and scientific discovery, and asserted that it was superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilisation. He also advocated for separation of church and state. The dictum, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence", has become known as Hitchens's razor.
context_section_description: Hitchens was raised nominally Christian and attended Christian boarding schools, but from an early age he declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was of Jewish descent on his mother's side and that his Jewish ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland). Hitchens was married twice, first to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981; the couple had a son, Alexander, and a daughter, Sophia.
  In 1991, Hitchens married his second wife, Carol Blue, an American screenwriter, in a ceremony held at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation. They had a daughter together, Antonia. Hitchens considered reading, writing, and public speaking not as a job or career but as "what I am, who I am, [and] what I love."
  In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a pact with her lover, a defrocked clergyman named Timothy Bryan. The pair overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover his mother's body, initially under the impression that she had been murdered.
caption: Hitchens after a talk at The College of New Jersey in March 2009
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