Christopher Hitchens: iconoclast, critic, essayist, columnist, editor, author, and outspoken and unapologetic atheist, died from pneumonia as a complication of esophageal cancer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas on December 15. He was 62.

I had the good fortune to meet Hitchens a few times. When I was an editor with Free Inquiry magazine Hitchens was a columnist. He had come to Amherst, New York, where Free Inquiry is published, to speak at the Center for Inquiry. We had taken him to dinner where he had, not unexpectedly, imbibed quite a bit of alcohol. He seemed to have not been affected much by it because he shortly thereafter delivered an excellent speech, focusing largely on threats of Islam throughout the world.