Hitchens Remembered

Though he had never met him in person, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that he remained “grateful for having studied at Hitchens’s virtual foot.”

James Fallows’s remembrance was more complicated because, as he confessed, “I admired him but we were not friends, mainly because of disagreements arising from the 2000 election … and then of course the Iraq War.” Fallows praised Hitchens’s “erudition and allusions,” and reflected on his sometimes obdurate dedication to his opinions.

“He was more certain than most people of the black-and-white moral goodness of the case for war—and therefore of the moral weakness and spinelessness of those who doubted the case,” Fallows wrote, “and more reluctant than most to revise or reflect upon that view in light of changing facts.”

“His was a complex genius,” Fallows concluded, “all parts of which are worth remembering honestly.”

Such honesty was important to Hitchens, Schwarz remembered. “Christopher prized bravery above all other qualities,” he wrote, “and in particular the bravery required for unflinching honesty.”

In all his complexity and brash irreverence, then–senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz remembered, Hitchens was also “profoundly human,” with “a tremendous capacity for awe” and a particular reverence for friendship.

The policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour recalled how, early in his career, he had met and formed a lasting acquaintance with Hitchens. “I was always surprised by how unfailingly gracious he was with his time,” he wrote.

The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, then a staff writer, added one poignant line to the remembrances: “I don’t think he would mind my saying that I thank God for the privilege of having known him.”

The 2019 winner of the Hitchens Prize is George Packer, currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously, for 15 years, a staff writer at The New Yorker. The past winners of the award are the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (2015); the Washington Post editor Marty Baron (2016); the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (2017); and the writer and activist Masha Gessen (2018).

Annika Neklason is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.