Christopher Hitchens, the maddening, infuriating, delightful, thrilling essayist and all around bon vivant and troublemaker, is dead

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. Christopher Hitchens, one of the free-est of the free thinkers I’ve ever come across, a guy who tossed ideas like hand grenades  and liked enough whiskey “to kill or stun the average mule”, has died after all all too brief battle with esophogeal cancer.  He was 62.

The announcement of his death, made initially by Vanity Fair, captures the essence of Hitchens quite well:

In Memoriam Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eyeretrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

Read more at Vanity Fair