Letters to a Young Contrarian is the contribution of which Anglo-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist?
Christopher Hitchens Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an Anglo-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on politics, literature and religion. A staple of public discourse, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded 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" and "Vanity Fair".
Letters from the Earth Letters from the Earth is a posthumously published work of celebrated American author Mark Twain (1835–1910). It comprises essays written during a difficult time in Twain's life (1904–09), when he was deeply in debt and had recently lost his wife and one of his daughters. The content concerns morality and religion and strikes a sarcastic — Twain's own term throughout the book — tone. Initially, another of his daughters, Clara Clemens, objected to its publication in March 1939, probably because of its controversial and iconoclastic views on religion, claiming it presented a ""distorted"" view of her father. Henry Nash Smith helped change her position in 1960. Clara explained her change of heart in 1962 saying that ""Mark Twain belonged to the world"" and that public opinion had become more tolerant. She was also influenced to release the papers by her annoyance with Soviet reports that her father's ideas were being suppressed in the United States. The papers were selected, edited and sequenced for the book in 1939 by Bernard DeVoto.