Hitchens, a Washington, D.C.-based author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes left and right, died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer, according to a statement from Vanity Fair magazine. He was 62.

“There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar,” said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.”

He had enjoyed his drink (enough to “to kill or stun the average mule”) and cigarettes, until he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus.

He was a most engaged, prolific and public intellectual who wrote numerous books, was a frequent television commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications. He became a popular author in 2007 thanks to “God is Not Great,” a manifesto for atheists.

Long after his diagnosis, his columns and essays appeared regularly, savaging the royal family, reveling in the death of Osama bin Laden, or pondering the letters of poet Philip Larkin. He was intolerant of nonsense, including about his own health. In a piece which appeared in the January 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, he dismissed the old saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

“So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion,” he wrote. “It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.”

Eloquent and intemperate, bawdy and urbane, Hitchens was an acknowledged contrarian and contradiction — half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing; a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. But his passions remained constant and targets of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa, remained hated.

He was a militant humanist who believed in pluralism and racial justice and freedom of speech, big cities and fine art and the willingness to stand the consequences. He was smacked in the rear by then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and beaten up in Beirut. He once submitted to waterboarding to prove that it was indeed torture.

Hitchens was a committed sensualist who abstained from clean living as if it were just another kind of church. In 2005, he would recall a trip to Aspen, Colo., and a brief encounter after stepping off a ski lift.

“I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition,” he wrote. “What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. ‘Sir, that would be inappropriate.’ In what respect? ‘At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level.’ In that case, I said, make it a double.”

An emphatic ally and inspired foe, he stood by friends in trouble (“Satanic Verses” novelist Salman Rushdie) and against enemies in power (Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). His heroes included George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Gore Vidal (pre-Sept. 11). Among those on the Hitchens list of shame: Michael Moore, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong il, Sarah Palin, Gore Vidal (post Sept. 11) and Prince Charles.

“We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant,” Hitchens wrote in Slate in 2010 after the heir to the British throne gave a speech criticizing Galileo for the scientist’s focus on “the material aspect of reality.”

“He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.”

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949. His father, Eric, was a “purse-lipped” Navy veteran known as “The Commander”; his mother, Yvonne, a romantic who later kill herself during an extra-marital rendezvous in Greece. Young Christopher would have rather read a book. He was a “a mere weed and weakling and kick-bag” who discovered that “words could function as weapons” and so stockpiled them.

In college, Oxford, he made such longtime friends as authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and claimed to be nearby when visiting Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton did or did not inhale marijuana. Radicalized by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies, was kicked out of Britain’s Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War and became a correspondent for the radical magazine International Socialiam. His reputation broadened in the 1970s through his writings for the New Statesman.

Wavy-haired and brooding and aflame with wit and righteous anger, he was a star of the left on paper and on camera, a popular television guest and a columnist for one of the world’s oldest liberal publications, The Nation. In friendlier times, Vidal was quoted as citing Hitchens as a worthy heir to his satirical throne.

But Hitchens never could simply nod his head. He feuded with fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, broke with Vidal and angered freedom of choice supporters by stating that the child’s life begins at conception. An essay for Vanity Fair was titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” and Hitchens wasn’t kidding.

He had long been unhappy with the left’s reluctance to confront enemies or friends. He would note his strong disappointment that Arthur Miller and other leading liberals shied from making public appearances on behalf of Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death. He advocated intervention in Bosnia and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

No Democrat angered him more than Clinton, whose presidency led to the bitter end of Hitchens’ friendship with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal and other Clinton backers. As Hitchens wrote in his memoir, he found Clinton “hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics.”

He wrote the anti-Clinton book, “No One Left to Lie To,” at a time when most liberals were supporting the president as he faced impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens also loathed Hillary Rodham Clinton and switched his affiliation from independent to Democrat in 2008 just so he could vote against her in the presidential primary.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, completed his exit. He fought with Vidal, Noam Chomsky and others who either suggested that U.S. foreign policy had helped caused the tragedy or that the Bush administration had advanced knowledge. He supported the Iraq war, quit The Nation, backed Bush for re-election in 2004 and repeatedly chastised those whom he believed worried unduly about the feelings of Muslims.

“It’s not enough that faith claims to be the solution to all problems,” he wrote in Slate in 2009 after a Danish newspaper apologized for publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that led Muslim organizations to threaten legal action. “It is now demanded that such a preposterous claim be made immune from any inquiry, any critique, and any ridicule.”

His essays were compiled in such books as “For the Sake of Argument” and “Prepared for the Worst.” He also wrote short biographies/appreciations of Paine and Thomas Jefferson, a tribute to Orwell and “Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring),” in which he advised that “Only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity.” A collection of essays, “Arguably,” came out in September 2011 and he was planning a “book-length meditation on malady and mortality.” He appeared in a 2010 documentary about the topical singer Phil Ochs.

Survived by his second wife, author Carol Blue, and by his three children (Alexander, Sophia and Antonia), Hitchens had quotable ideas about posterity, clarified years ago when he saw himself referred to as “the late” Christopher Hitchens in print. For the May 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, before his illness, Hitchens submitted answers for the Proust Questionnaire, a probing and personal survey for which the famous have revealed everything from their favorite color to their greatest fear.

His vision of earthly bliss: “To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

His ideal way to die: “Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).”

Blair, 57, converted to Catholicism after leaving office in 2007. Since then he has started the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to promote understanding between religions.

He faced a fierce opponent in the debating ring Friday night. Hitchens, 61, an avowed atheist, Vanity Fair columnist and author of “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” has been a prominent voice in attacking religion.

“Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs, to appeal to our fear and to our guilt — is it good for the world?” Hitchens said in his opening remarks.

“To terrify children with the image of hell … to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?” Hitchens asked as he opened the debate hosted by the Munk Debates center.

Though his face was pale and drawn, and his trademark mop of unruly hair gone, he was no less animated than usual in spite of his battle with cancer of the esophagus. He said earlier Friday that he scheduled his chemotherapy treatments around the debate so he “wouldn’t have to let anyone down,”

“This is what I do whether I’m sick or not. (Religion) is still the main argument,” said Hitchens who has made it known that his diagnosis has not opened him to God or religious belief.

Hitchens fueled the debate by criticizing religion for blocking peace in the Middle East, perpetuating poverty by subjugating women as inferior and causing numerous conflicts including the genocide in Rwanda — a country he says “is the most Christian country in the world, and one which many of the people who committed the crimes are now hiding in the pulpit.”

Blair acknowledged that religion has been used to lead people to commit indescribable acts, but it has also led people to commit acts of goodness.

“Health care in Africa has been delivered by those motivated by their religion … The abolition of slavery was achieved by combined secularism and non-secularism. At least accept that there are people who are doing great things because of their faith,” he said.

Blair incited a sarcastic response from Hitchens when he argued the Northern Ireland peace process is an example of how people of different faiths can bridge their differences.

“It’s very touching for Tony to say that he recently went to a meeting to bridge the religious divide in Northern Ireland, where does the religious divide come from?” Hitchens asked. “Four-hundred years and more in my own country of birth of people killing each other’s children depending on what kind of Christian they were.”

Although a lot of conflicts have religious roots, it’s futile to try to drive religion out, Blair said.

“In the end, it’s for politics and religion to try and work out a way in which religion in a world of globalization that is pushing people together can play a positive rather than negative role,” he added.

Audience members voted on the debate and preliminary results posted on the Munk Debates website sided with Hitchens, with 68 percent saying that religion is more of a destructive than benign force in the world.

BBC World News and the News Channel will broadcast the debate on Jan., 1 2011.

The party was in honor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the refugee writer from Somalia, by way of Holland, who has been happily appropriated by the neoconservative right because of her hostility to the religion of her upbringing, Islam. Although she identifies as a pro-choice atheist, Hirsi Ali is a heroic figure to the clash-of-civilizations set for her militant embrace of the values of the Enlightenment. She’s a foreigner who’s renounced the dark ways of her homeland, and loudly declared the superiority of Western culture, at no small personal risk.

Hirsi Ali, it should be said, has lived an amazing life. It’s no small thing to escape from an oppressive and backward environment and reinvent oneself as a crusading feminist. And her feminist critique of religion is fairly devastating, though she is under no circumstances willing to apply it to Western life as well as Islam. Despite her valid complaint with the oppressive aspects of Islam, there’s a distinct note of contempt in her work for the people of the Islamic world in general, and a refusal to acknowledge any shortcomings of Western liberalism. And this seems to be why the neoconservative, bombs-away crowd adores her. (As Glenn Greenwald points out, the tight embrace between the people who claim to care the most about oppression in the Islamic world and the people who are most eager to drop heavy-duty ordnance on Muslims is an amazing thing.)

It’s significant that the party for Hirsi Ali was thrown by David Frum and Danielle Crittenden Frum. David Frum, of course, is the former Bush administration speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil.” More recently, he’s been banished from the conservative movement and deprived of his position at the American Enterprise Institute — now Hirsi Ali’s home base — because of his agitation for the GOP to move to the center. Frum has been consistently hostile to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Parties. The final straw, however, came when he described the passage of the healthcare reform bill as the Republicans’ “Waterloo.”

Other notables in attendance included Christopher Hitchens, the former Nation columnist and ex-Trotskyite who became a cheerleader for military adventures in the Middle East, seeing them as wars against the benighted devout who are Hirsi Ali’s bugbear as well. Kathleen Parker was there too. To jog your memory, Parker is the Washington Post conservative who made an impression during the 2008 election by calling Palin “out of her league” and denouncing the GOP’s “oogedy-boogedy” religious wing. The academic critic of feminism Christina Hoff Sommers was there too. Says Sommers, “But I’m a feminist, just a moderate one!” The list goes on like this, but I’ll spare you.

This party, in other words, was for people who’ve been expelled from their own parties, or chosen to quit them. Everyone in attendance seems to have found a place as an exile from some ostensibly insane tribe — overzealous feminists, or leftists, or Islamists, or conservatives.

In holding themselves up as the lonely models of sanity, Hirsi Ali, Hitchens, Frum and the rest have built whole lives and careers around ignoring and belittling the legitimate aspirations of the movements they’ve abandoned. Rather than formulate thoughtful, nuanced dissent, in each case, these people have turned themselves into foils, and their former ideological homes into ridiculous caricatures.

Like it or not, for example, the reinvigorated GOP right wing is a complicated phenomenon that has deep historical roots and is in a kind of quiet class struggle with the party’s corporate elite. That doesn’t mean we need to do what the Tea Party says, but the way Kathleen Parker wrote them off as the “oogedy-boogedy” faction elucidates the enormous condescension for the grass roots of Beltway “dissenters” who populated the cocktail party.

The Times reports an exchange between Hitchens, Sommers and Hirsi Ali that makes the point perfectly.

The conversation turned to Iran. “Look at the way the left stood up to South Africa. Where are the feminists when it comes to the situation for women in Iran?” Ms. Sommers said. “Liberal intellectuals are more offended by Islamophobia than they are by sharia,” or Islamic law, Mr. Hitchens offered.

I’m glad to be taking lectures on feminism from the man who thinks women are congenitally unfunny and suggested that his mother killed herself because she was going through menopause and losing her looks.

Then there’s Hirsi Ali herself. The Times quotes a speech she gave in Madison, Wis., earlier this year. “Some people find my views controversial. They argue that I should be silenced.”

Some people, of course, do think Hirsi Ali should be silenced. But it’s not the same group that merely finds her “controversial.” This is the extraordinary narcissism of people who think that they personally embody political principle. Either you’re at the party, or you’re part of the unthinking hordes. With that much smug superiority gathered in one backyard, I’m surprised they needed tiki torches at all. My impression was that the sun shines only for these people.

If you’re interested in Hitchens trivia, “Hitch 22″ is loaded. The favorite “good-bad book” (to use G.K. Chesterton’s phrase) of his youth was “How Green Was My Valley.” He is part Jewish (on his mother’s side); she wanted him to be “an English gentleman.” His father, a military man, was known as “The Commander.” His “literary hero” is Borges, he thinks Costa-Gavras’ “Z” is “the greatest of all sixties movies.”

What about the big stuff, such as the supposed confessions of bisexuality that have been titillating the British press and his conversion from socialist or Marxist or whatever he felt like calling himself before the World Trade towers came down to defender of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy? More on the latter in a moment, but the former amounts to nothing at all. Hitchens never really says he is or was bisexual; he does admit to having slept with a couple of unnamed young men while at Oxford, but I thought something like that simply meant you were English.

In place of revelation, there is lots and lots of gossip. Hitchens, to take him by his own accounts, is the Zelig of modern Anglo-American letters; he seems to have been everywhere, talked to everyone and made friends in every corner of the world, whether or not anyone else was there to record the conversation.

People seem to want to tell Christopher Hitchens their secrets; like Nick Carraway, he is “privy to the secret of wild, unknown men.” Also some that are very well known: Gore Vidal, we learn, would take “rugged young men recruited from the Via Veneto … from the rear” where they were then taken into the next room where “Tom [Driberg, the journalist] would suck them dry.” (We are not told whether this occurred while Hitchens was still in his Oxford phase.)

Name-dropping, which has become a distressing trait in Hitchens’ work in recent years, is now approaching critical mass. Long stretches of “Hitch-22″ read like literary bouquets to Hitch gathered by himself. He names and quotes the usual suspects — Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, long ago identified by Hitchens as partisans. Joining their ranks are “my Argentine anti-fascist friend, Jacobo Timerman,” “my Kurdish friends,” Susan Sontag’s son “my dear friend David,” “my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg [who] said to my face over a table at La Tomate …,” “my friend and ally Richard Dawkins,” “my beloved friend James Fenton,” and “my then friend Noam Chomsky” (even former friends with well-known names make Hitch’s cut). Regrettably, the late great Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James didn’t quite make the list; he passed shortly after Hitchens arrived at his deathbed.

When he isn’t writing about his friends in “Hitch-22,” he is usually writing about how proud he is to have such friends. He was “proud” to be mentioned several times in Martin Amis’ memoir and “absurdly proud” to have a poem by James Fenton dedicated to him. He is, however, “offended” at the idea that he might have been Tom Wolfe’s model for the English journalist in “Bonfire of the Vanities” — in which case he shouldn’t have mentioned it or I would never have known there was such a rumor.

That Hitchens wants to flash his friendships and credentials is of minor importance. That he wishes to justify his complicity in the disaster of the Iraq war is another matter altogether. “I probably know more about the impeachable incompetence of the Bush administration than do many of those who would have left Iraq in the hands of Saddam,” he writes. To which the proper response would be: It’s a shame you didn’t know less or you might have made a smarter decision. “If I was ever naive about anything to do with Iraq WMD” — please, Christopher, don’t pretend to be disingenuous, you know very well if you were naive about this — “it was in believing that the production of evidence like that, or indeed any other kind of evidence, would make even the most limited impression on the heavily armored certainties of the faithful.”

In other words, Hitchens wanted war against Saddam whether there were WMD or not, and that those who disagreed with his position were guilty of “heavily armored certainties to the contrary” on the subject. In which case one wonders why Hitchens didn’t simply write at the time, “I’m positive Saddam has WMD, but even if I’m wrong you should agree with my position.”

Which leads to the one truly offensive section of “Hitch-22,” namely Hitchens’ dragging the family of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, Mark Daily of Irvine, Calif., into the story. Apparently the young man, a UCLA honors graduate, “had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq” but, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times that Hitchens quotes, “writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for the war deeply influenced him.”

“I found myself thinking,” Hitchens writes, “of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan.’” Hitchens adroitly dismisses “any comparison between myself and one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century” — except, of course, to point it out to us.

Hitchens goes on Jennings’ MySpace page and finds a link to one of his own articles. This makes him feel “hollow.”

“I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here,” he writes, thus making a parade of his own feelings. He contacts the young soldier’s family and pays them a visit. Why, exactly, do we need to know about this? It seems very much as if Hitchens is trying to let those of us who were and are against the war know that the soldiers who died in Iraq were decent and noble and had honorable intentions. But who would argue to the contrary? The sentiments of those who served there, no mater who influenced them, are not the issue in Iraq any more than they were in the Vietnam War or even World War II.

If Hitchens’ intention was to take responsibility for having influenced the soldier’s decision, which led to his death, it would have been easier to accept without the allusion to Yeats, to say nothing of his double talk in defense of the war. I’m reminded of a much more courageous admission made by Norman Mailer to a reporter who asked him what he would say if the parents of the man Jack Abbott murdered told him he had blood on his hands. “I’d say,” Mailer replied, “that they were right.”

God — if Hitchens will excuse my use of the term — knows that we always need a good, hard-bitten contrarian, but something has become skewed in Hitchens’ vision since 9/11 shifted him to the right. In an article in October 2009 for the Atlantic, Hitchens feigned surprise at discovering that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Al Franken were … liberal. “Bush’s brain or IQ,” he observes, “is enough to ignite peals of mirth from those in Stewart’s studio crowd, who just know they are smarter than he.” Of course, they are smarter than Bush, and Hitchens surely knows this. He does himself and his readers no service by pretending, even for a moment, that this isn’t true, and he pretends it for more than 400 pages in “Hitch-22.”