Martin Amis
Martin Amis in 2012
Born	(1949-08-25) 25 August 1949 (age 62) Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom[1]
Nationality	British
Education	MA (Oxon)
Alma mater	Exeter College, Oxford
Notable work(s)	Money (1984), London Fields (1989)
Influenced by	Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce[1]
Spouse	Antonia Phillips (1984–1993); Isabel Fonseca (1996–present)
Children	Delilah (1976), Louis (1985), Jacob (1986), Fernanda (1997), Clio (1999)
Parents	Kingsley Amis (father), Hilary Ann Bardwell (mother)
Relatives	Philip Amis (brother), Sally Amis (sister)

Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.^[2] The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.^[3]

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness."^[4] Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."^[1]

Early life[link]

Amis was born in Swansea, South Wales.^[1] His father, Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant.^[4] He has an older brother, Philip, and his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents divorced when he was twelve.

He attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s—including the Bishop Gore School (Swansea Grammar School), and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys—where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising."^[1] The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured.

In 1965, at age 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.

He read nothing but comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often names as his earliest influence. After teenage years spent in flowery shirts and a short spell at Westminster School while living in Hampstead, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a "Congratulatory" First in English — "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers."^[5]

After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, and at age 27 became literary editor of the New Statesman, where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remained a close friend until Hitchens's death in 2011.

Early writing[link]

According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in his son's work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself," Kingsley complained.^[4]

His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) won the Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.

He also wrote the screenplay for the film Saturn 3, an experience which he was to draw on for his fifth novel Money.

Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000.

Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).

Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's 'Martian' school of poetry.

Main career[link]

1980s and 1990s[link]

Amis's best-known novels are Money, London Fields, and The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy."^[6] Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives.

Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note) is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century." "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed,"^[7] the novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. Time included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005.^[8] On 11 November 2009, The Guardian reported that the BBC had adapted Money for television as part of their early 2010 schedule for BBC 2.^[9] Nick Frost played John Self.^[9] The television adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser, Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall.^[9] The adaptation was a "two-part drama" and was written by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford.^[9] After the transmission of the first of the two parts, Amis was quick to praise the adaptation, stating that "All the performances (were) without weak spots. I thought Nick Frost was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. He fills the character. It's a very unusual performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely graceful, a pleasure to watch...It looked very expensive even though it wasn't and that's a feat...The earlier script I saw was disappointing (but) they took it back and worked on it and it's hugely improved. My advice was to use more of the language of the novel, the dialogue, rather than making it up."^[10]

London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined to come between the other two. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there was only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, 'It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."^[11]

Amis's 1991 offering, the short novel Time's Arrow, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Notable for its unique, backwards narrative - including dialogue in reverse - the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The unique reversal of time in the novel seemingly transforms Auschwitz - and the entire theatre of war - into a place of joy, healing, and resurrection.

The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.^[12] The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences.^[13] The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels," is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.

Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel Night Train, is narrated by the mannish American Detective Mike Hoolihan. The story revolves around the suicide of her boss's teenage daughter. Like most of Amis's work, Night Train is dark, bleak, and foreboding, arguably a reflection of the author's views on America. Amis's distinctively American vernacular in the narrative was criticized by, among others, John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor and friend, the late Saul Bellow.^[14]

2000s[link]

The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the nineteen-seventies (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic uptick in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection).

In the year 2000 Amis published a memoir titled Experience. Largely concerned with the strange relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.

In 2002 Amis published Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the material, and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend, Christopher Hitchens. Once a passionate and committed leftist, Hitchens' alleged sympathy for Stalin and communism was criticized by Amis. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in The Atlantic, his friendship with Amis appears to have emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."^[15]

In 2003, Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was published. The novel drew mixed reviews, and was most notably denounced by the novelist Tibor Fischer: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder… It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."^[16] Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considered the book to be a great disappointment.^{[citation needed]} Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for."^[17] Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award.^[18]

Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to Uruguay with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.

In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh novel. House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also saw some consideration of the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman. House of Meetings saw some better critical notices than Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality while others felt that he was not suited to writing an ostensibly serious historical novel. Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in The Independent, the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories - one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of 11 September attacks - but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book."^[19] In the same 2006 interview, Amis revealed that he had "recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (the title was based on one of Donald Rumsfeld's characteristically strangulated linguistic formulations) in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on a town called Greeley, Colorado"^[19] and instead continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:^[20]

"The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child."^[19]

The new novel took some considerable time to write and was not published before the end of the decade. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection with compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well and was widely discussed and debated.

2010s[link]

In 2010, after a long period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision, Amis published his long-awaited new long novel, The Pregnant Widow, which marks the beginning of a new four-book deal. Originally set for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back to 2009 and then 2010 as further editing and alterations were being made, expanding the novel to some 480 pages. A statement from publishers Johnathan Cape describes the content of the novel:

"The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester. Martin Amis, in "The Pregnant Widow", takes as his control experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of "Money" with the historical sense of "Time's Arrow" and "House of Meetings"."^[21]

The first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 at the Norwich Playhouse as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival.^[22] At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Norwich Writers' Centre by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an aging man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically (something that has been interesting the press recently), but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction, and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form."^[22] Additionally, Amis "seemed quite happy reading the opening pages in the novel’s first public outing."^[22]

Further details concerning the novel's plot were revealed by The Times on 10 May 2009, its reporter Maurice Chittenden writing that at the event "Amis said the book was originally meant to be based much more closely on his own life. He had introduced more fictional passages after realising the format was not working," and that he "[had] been working on the partly autobiographical The Pregnant Widow for more than five years."^[23]

Chittenden writes that Amis said at the event regarding the length of the novel's protracted writing and creative gestation:

"In 2003 I tried for a couple of years [to make the novel more autobiographical]. I flailed about and it all felt awful. Bits were autobiographical but I had to completely rethink it. It was an uncontrollably long and pointless novel of 200,000 words. But the summer in Italy, I drew that out.�^[23]

In an 1 August 2009 interview with The Afterworld, Amis clarified the nature of some of the content of The Pregnant Widow and revealed that he is currently "writing two novels at the same time":^[24]

I started a novel [but] then I’m going to write a novella before I get on to it. But I was in big trouble a few years ago, with a huge, dead novel. And it took me a long time, and a lot of grief, to realize -- I thought I was clutching at straws -- it turned out it was actually two novels, and they couldn’t go together. So I wrote The Pregnant Widow, [that’s] one half of it, and the other half I started, and it will be very autobiographical, the next one.^[24]

Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow once again saw Amis receiving mixed reviews from the press and sales being average at best. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a general expectation that Amis' time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize long list (as were efforts by his contemporaries Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie).

Amis's next project is a novella currently titled State of England, and that will be followed by another full novel made up of some of the other half of the original draft of The Pregnant Widow.

[edit] State of England

On 27 October 2009, The Daily Telegraph reported that during a recent appearance by Amis at the Hay Festival in Wales, Amis had discussed his fascination with the glamour model turned celebrity author Katie Price (formerly known as Jordan). Amis went on to reveal that he "has honoured [Price] with a character bearing some of her traits" in his forthcoming novella provisionally titled State of England (also the title of a 1996 short story by Amis). Amis said that the character was named "Threnody."^[25]

Further details about State of England were revealed in an interview with The Times in late January 2010. According to the article, "[Amis has] nearly finished his next novel, State of England, about chavs, which contains one character, Threnody, inspired by Katie Price and another, “my worst yet�, he says, based on Mikey Carroll, a crack-smoking lottery winner. "Lionel Asbo wins £90m on the lottery and does something so vicious ... I can't tell you what."^[26]

Other works[link]

Amis has also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), four volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché and The Second Plane), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines which he has since disavowed^[27] (Invasion of the Space Invaders). He also regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes, and contributes book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in their own right in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.^[28]

Current life[link]

Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008 when his daughter Delilah gave birth to a son.^[29] He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.^[29]

In late 2010 Amis bought a property in the Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn, New York, although it is unclear whether he will be permanently moving to New York or just maintaining another 'sock' there.^[30]

Political opinions[link]

A conversation between Martin Amis and Ian Buruma on "Monsters" at the 2007 New Yorker Festival.^[31]

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."

He wrote in "Nuclear City" in Esquire of 1987 (re-published in Visiting Mrs Nabokov) that: "when nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe."

Amis expressed his opinions on terrorism in an extended essay published in The Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in which he criticized the economic development of all Arab countries because their "aggregate GDP... was less than the GDP of Spain", and they "lag[ged] behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality."^[32]

The Catholic-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for a particular quote (which Eagleton mistakenly attributed to one of Amis's essays),^{[citation needed]} taken the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, in an informal interview in The Times Magazine. Amis was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It’s a huge dereliction on their part".^[33] Eagleton wrote that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world".

In a highly critical article in the Guardian "The absurd world of Martin Amis" the satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employ "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Qu'ran" to incite hatred.^[34]

In a later piece, Eagleton added: "But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment."^[35]

Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating that:

A prominent British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning Amis and he responded with an open letter to The Independent which the newspaper printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton.^[37] In an article in The Guardian, Amis subsequently wrote:

On terrorism, Martin Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder," and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."^[32]

In comments on the BBC in October 2006 Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the most dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis Of Evil, but that Iran was our "natural enemy", suggesting that we should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence."^[38]

His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet Blitcon^[39] from the New Statesman (his former employer). This term, it has since been argued, was wrongly applied.^[40]

His political opinions have been attacked in some quarters, particularly in The Guardian.^[41] He has received support from many other writers. In The Spectator, Philip Hensher noted:

In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world".^[43]

Agnosticism[link]

In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly, "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.^[44]

In 2010, he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe.... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."^[45]

Recent employment[link]

In February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.^[29]

Of his position, he said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but...I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them."^[29] He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants."^[29] It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year.^[46] The Manchester Evening News broke the story claiming that according to his contract this meant he was paid £3000 an hour for 28 hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers. As with any other member of academic staff, his teaching contact hours constituted a minority of his commitments, a point confirmed in the original article by a reply from the University.^[47] In January 2011, it was announced that he would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year.^[48]

From October 2007 to July 2011, at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall or at the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Martin Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st century literature, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing, his novel The Pregnant Widow, violence, film, the short story, and America).^[49]

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Martin Amis

Novels[link]

• The Rachel Papers (1973)
• Dead Babies (1975)
• Success (1978)
• Other People (1981)
• Money (1984)
• London Fields (1989)
• Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence (1991)
• The Information (1995)
• Night Train (1997)
• Yellow Dog (2003)
• House of Meetings (2006)
• The Pregnant Widow (2010)
• The State of England: Lionel Asbo, Lotto Lout (2012)

Collections[link]

• Einstein's Monsters (1987)
• Two Stories (1994)
• God's Dice (1995)
• Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998)
• Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)
• The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
• Vintage Amis (2004)

Non fiction[link]

• Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
• The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
• Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
• Experience (2000)
• The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
• Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) (about Joseph Stalin and Russian History)
• The Second Plane (2008)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Martin Amis

• Works by or about Martin Amis in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Comprehensive information and hubs[link]

• The Martin Amis Web (created by James Diedrick; now managed by Gavin Keulks)
• Martin Amis - Author Page (Guardian Books)
• Martin Amis, The New York Times: Reviews of Martin Amis's earlier books; articles about and by Martin Amis
• Martin Amis at Contemporary Writers
• Martin Amis: Bio, excerpts, interviews and articles in the archives of the Prague Writers' Festival
• Martin Amis at the Internet Book List
• Martin Amis Events at The Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester

Sample works and articles by Amis[link]

• Authors in the front line: Martin Amis, The Sunday Times Magazine, 6 February 2005 – On the streets of Colombia, young boys cripple or murder each other just for showing disrespect or for winning at a game of cards. Is the taste for violence opening up a wound that can never heal? Report: Martin Amis – In The Sunday Times Magazine's continuing series of articles, renowned writers bring a fresh perspective to the world's trouble spots. The international medical-aid organisation MSF has helped our correspondents reach some of these inhospitable areas.
• CareerMove - A complete short story by Amis.
• The Unknown Known - A satire on fundamentalism in this extract from an unpublished manuscript by Amis. NOTE: Requires subscription to Granta to access.
• Martin Amis articles at Byliner

Interviews[link]

• Francesca Riviere (Spring 1998). "Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1156/the-art-of-fiction-no-151-martin-amis. 
• Transcript of online web discussion (2002)
• Goading the Enemy an interview with Amis by Silvia Spring for Newsweek International regarding terrorism. (11/6/2006)
• Martin Amis interviewed by Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm
• Discussion between Martin Amis and Zachary Leader about Kingsley Amis
• Martin Amis in conversation with Tom Chatfield for Prospect Magazine, January 2010, including controversial comments on JM Coetzee

Reviews[link]

• 'Money and Pornography', a review of the role of pornography in Amis' novels, from Money to Yellow Dog, in the Oxonian Review

Note: for reviews of an individual work, please see its article.

Amis and "Islamism"[link]

• Martin Amis interviewed by Ginny Dougary (2006)
  • This is the interview in which Amis gives the response that began the controversy.
• Shame on Us
• The Absurd World of Martin Amis by Chris Morris
• "Martin Amis and the boredom of terror": an article in the TLS by Marjorie Perloff, 13 February 2008

Community[link]

• The Martin Amis Discussion Board

Media[link]

• Martin Amis interviewed Windows Media Video by Tony Jones on Lateline (11 January 2006)
• A Discussion with Charlie Rose about his book "The Pregnant Widow," his career, and his friend and fellow author Christopher Hitchens

Other[link]

• The Amis Inheritance – Profile on Martin and Kingsley Amis from New York Times Magazine (22 April 2007).
• Hendon Mob Poker Tournament Results

v t e Martin Amis Novels The Rachel Papers (1973) Dead Babies (1975) Success (1978) Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) Money: A Suicide Note (1984) London Fields (1989) Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991) The Information (1995) Night Train (1997) Yellow Dog (2003) House of Meetings (2006) The Pregnant Widow (2010) Short stories "The Unknown Known" (2008) Short story collections Einstein's Monsters (1987) Two Stories (1994) God's Dice (1995) Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998) Amis Omnibus (1999) The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000) Vintage Amis (2004) Screenplays Saturn 3 (1980) Non-fiction Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982) The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986) Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993) Experience (2000) The War Against Cliché (2001) Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) The Second Plane (2008) People Kingsley Amis Sally Amis Hilary Bardwell

Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens speaking in 2007
Born	Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-04-13)13 April 1949 Portsmouth, England
Died	15 December 2011(2011-12-15) (aged 62) Houston, Texas
Occupation	Writer, journalist, public speaker
Nationality	English American
Citizenship	British and American
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Subjects	Politics, religion, history, biography, literature
Spouse(s)	Eleni Meleagrou (m. 1981-1989; divorced) Carol Blue (m. 1989-2011; his death)
Relative(s)	Peter Hitchens (brother)
Influences George Orwell,[1] Leszek Kolakowski, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Hofstadter, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Israel Shahak,[2] Isaiah Berlin, Émile Zola, W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag[3]
Influenced Johann Hari,[4] Martin Amis,[5]
Signature

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 â€“ 15 December 2011) was an English American^[6][7] author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades.^[8] Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch",^[9] was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.^[10][11]

A noted critic of religion and a self described "antitheist", he said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion."^[12] According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. His 2007 book, God Is Not Great, sold over 500,000 copies.

On 15 December 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, a complication of his cancer, in the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. A popular figure, his death prompted tributes and eulogies from a range of public figures, including Tony Blair, Richard Dawkins, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Nick Clegg, Stephen Fry and Bill Maher.

Life and career[link]

Early life and education[link]

His mother, Yvonne Jean (née Hickman), and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II.^[13] Yvonne was at the time a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service),^[14] and Eric a "purse-lipped and silent" commander, whose ship HMS Jamaica helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape.^[3] His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including in Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.

Hitchens's mother having argued that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,"^[15] he was sent off to Mount House School in Tavistock in Devon at the age of eight, followed by the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and then at Balliol College in Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell.^[14] In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge.^[16]

Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22.^[17] These experiences continued in his college years, when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of the Thatcher government.^[18]

In the 1960s Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.^[19]

He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organization was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam".^{[20][clarification needed]} Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism.^[14] Shortly after he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect".^[21]

Journalistic career (1970–1981)[link]

Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,^[22] published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree.^[23] In 1971 he went to work at the Times Higher Education Supplement where he served as a social science correspondent.^[24] Hitchens admitted that he hated the position, and was later fired; he recalled, "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it."^[25] He then went on to become a researcher for ITV's Weekend World.^[26] In 1973 he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with the authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, among others.^[26] At the New Statesman he acquired a reputation as a fierce left-winger, aggressively attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.

In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a suicide pact with her lover, a former clergyman named Timothy Bryan.^[14] They overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover his mother's body. Hitchens said he thought his mother was pressured into suicide by fear that her husband would learn of her infidelity, as their marriage had been strained and unhappy. Both her children were then independent adults. While in Greece, Hitchens reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta. It became his first leading article for the New Statesman.^[27]

In 1977, unhappy at the New Statesman, Hitchens defected to the Daily Express where he became a foreign correspondent.^[26] He returned to the New Statesman in 1979 where he became foreign editor.^[26]

American career (1981–2011)[link]

After moving to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation, where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.^{[28][29][30][31][32][33][34]} He became a contributing editor of Vanity Fair in 1992,^[35] writing ten columns a year. In 2002 Asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named after him.^[36] He left The Nation in 2002 after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,^[30] but others â€” including Hitchens (or he indicated as such while alive) â€” believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.^[37][38] In 1987, his father died from cancer of the esophagus.^[39] He became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008.^[40]

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus.^[41] Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda^[42] and the Darfur region of Sudan.^[43] His work took him to over 60 countries.^[44] In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.^[45]

Before Hitchens' political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir".^[46][47][48] In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco," calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories.^[49][50] Also, on the back of his book Hitch-22, among the praise from notable writers and figures, a Vidal quote endorsing Hitchens as his successor is crossed out with a red 'X' and a message saying "NO C.H." His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.^[51] An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.^[52]

In 2007 Hitchens' work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary".^[53] He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.^[54] He won the National Magazine Award for Columns about Cancer in 2011.^[55][56] Hitchens also served on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offered advice to Coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.^[57]

Literature reviews[link]

Hitchens wrote a monthly essay on books in The Atlantic^[58] and contributed occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In Why Orwell Matters, he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.

During a three-hour interview by Book TV,^[3] he named authors who have had influence on his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Political views[link]

The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto".^[60] In 2009, Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media".^[61] However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism. Hitchens' political perspective can be found in his wide ranging writings which include many of the political dialogues he published.

Socialism[link]

Hitchens became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." In 2001, he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist." Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist", but added, "I don't think that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system, are by any means all resolved." He stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies."^[62]

In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating, "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".^[63] In a June 2010 interview with The New York Times, he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist".^[64] In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was.^[65] Hitchens was an admirer of Che Guevara, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do â€” fought and died for his beliefs."^[66] However, in an essay written in 1997, he distanced himself from Che, and referred to the mythos surrounding him as a "cult".^[67]

He continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men,^[68][69] and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia.^[21][30] In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discrediting of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".^[21]

Iraq War and the war on terror[link]

In the years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, Hitchens became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican-right that promoted pro-liberalism intervention, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz.^[70] Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.^[71] In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues.^[72] Hitchens had also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".^[73]

Following the September 11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation.^[74][75] Chomsky responded^[76] and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky^[77] to which Chomsky again responded.^[78] Approximately a year after the September 11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden,^[79] and that they were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues.

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and he held numerous public debates on the topic with George Galloway^[80] and Scott Ritter.^[81]

Criticism of George W. Bush[link]

Prior to September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He also criticized Bush's support of intelligent design^[82] and capital punishment.^[83][83]

Although Hitchens defended Bush's post-September 11 foreign policy, he criticized the actions of U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and the U.S. government's use of waterboarding, which he unhesitatingly deemed as torture after being invited by Vanity Fair to voluntarily undergo it.^[84][85] In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.^[86][87][88]

Presidential endorsements[link]

Hitchens would elaborate on his political views and ideological shift in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv. In this discussion Hitchens revealed himself to be a supporter of Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, who was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore.^[89]

Hitchens speaking at a September 2000 third party protest at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates

Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".^[90]

In the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens in an article for Slate stated, "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity." He was critical of both main party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hitchens went on to support Obama, calling McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace".^[91]

Blumenthal–Hitchens feud[link]

Hitchens and Carol Blue chose to submit an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the trial of impeachment of Bill Clinton. In the affidavit, Blue and Hitchens swore that their then-friend, Sidney Blumenthal, had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial,^[92] and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts.^[92][93]

Israel–Palestine[link]

Hitchens had said of himself, "I am an Anti-Zionist. I'm one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians."^[94]

A review of his autobiography Hitch-22 in the Jewish Daily Forward refers to Hitchens as "a prominent anti-Zionist" and says that he views Zionism "as an injustice against the Palestinians".^[95] Others have commented on his anti-Zionism as well^[96] suggesting that his memoir was "marred by the occasional eruption of [his] anti-Zionism".^[97] The Jewish Daily Forward quoted him saying of Israel's prospects for the future, "I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable."^[95]

In Slate, Hitchens pondered the notion that, instead of curing antisemitism through the creation of a Jewish state, "Zionism has only replaced and repositioned"^[98] it, saying: "there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews." Hitchens argued that instead of supporting Zionism, Jews should help "secularize and reform their own societies", believing that unless one is religious, "what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place?" Indeed, Hitchens goes so far as to claim that the only justification for Zionism given by Jews is a religious one.^[99]

During a town hall function in Pennsylvania with Martin Amis, Hitchens stated that "one must not insult or degrade or humiliate people"^[100] and that he "would be opposed to this maltreatment of the Palestinians if it took place on a remote island with no geopolitical implications". Hitchens described Zionism as "an ethno-nationalist quasi-religious ideology" and stated his desire that if possible, he would "re-wind the tape [to] stop Hertzl from telling the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land".

He continued to say that Zionism "nonetheless has founded a sort of democratic state which isn't any worse in its practice than many others with equally dubious origins." He stated that settlement in order to achieve security for Israel is "doomed to fail in the worst possible way", and the cessation of this "appallingly racist and messianic delusion" would "confront the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews". However, Hitchens contended that the "solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists" and wondered "What did they imagine would be the response of the followers of the Prophet [Muhammad]?" Hitchens bemoaned the transference into religious terrorism of Arab secularism as a means of democratization: "the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad".^[98] He maintained that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a "trivial squabble" that has become "so dangerous to all of us" because of "the faith-based element."^[100]

Hitchens collaborated on this issue with prominent Palestinian advocate Edward Said, in 1988 publishing Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.

Domestic policy[link]

Hitchens actively supported drug policy reform and called for the abolition of the "War on Drugs" which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley.^[19] He supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as "sadistic".^[101] On the issue of abortion, Hitchens prioritized in affirming that he believed a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and supported the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believed in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights as "the only thing that is known to cure poverty", and in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether.^[102][103]

Other[link]

Other issues Hitchens wrote on the subjects of included his support for the reunification of Ireland,^[104][105] abolition of the British monarchy,^[106] and his condemnation of the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević^[107] and Franjo Tuđman^[108] in Yugoslavia, and the Bosnian War.^[109]

Critiques of specific individuals[link]

Hitchens was known for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures â€” Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa â€” were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also wrote book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters), and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography).

However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques took the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell,^[110][111] George Galloway,^[112] Mel Gibson,^[113] Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama,^[114] Michael Moore,^[115] Daniel Pipes,^[116] Ronald Reagan,^[117] Jesse Helms,^[118] and Cindy Sheehan.^[21][119]When comedian Bob Hope died in 2003, Hitchens wrote an attack piece on him, calling Hope "a fool and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian" and "Quick, then—what is your favorite Bob Hope gag? It wouldn't take you long if I challenged you on Milton Berle, or Woody Allen, or John Cleese, or even Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl. By this time tomorrow, I bet you haven't come up with a real joke for which Hope could take credit." Critics however argued that Hitchens focused solely on Hope's declining years and ignored his heyday in the 1940s.^[120]

Views on religion[link]

Hitchens often spoke out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he called "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). He said: "The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam".^{[cite this quote]} In his book, God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in The New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums"^[121] to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in the Financial Times.^[122] God Is Not Great was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007.^[123][124]

Hitchens contended that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world",^[125] "[v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In God Is Not Great, Hitchens contends that:

[A]bove all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.^[126]

Hitchens and John Lennox at an "Is God Great?" debate (Alabama, 2009)

His book rendered him one of the major advocates of the "New Atheism" movement, and he also was made an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.^[127] Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. He also served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America,^[128] a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. In 2007, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in Christianity Today magazine.^[129] This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on 27 October 2009.

On 26 November 2010 Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Canada at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it. Preliminary results on the Munk website said 56 per cent of the votes backed the proposition (Hitchens' position) before hearing the debate, with 22 per cent against (Blair's position), and 21 per cent undecided, with the undecided voters leaning toward Hitchens, giving him a 68 per cent to 32 per cent victory over Blair, after the debate.^[130][131]

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.^[132]

Hitchens was accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded "when religion is attacked in this country [...] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share".^[133] Hitchens had also been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in The American Conservative, and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge.^[134][135] In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."^[136] When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile".^[137] Piatak claimed that "A straightforward description of all Hitchens's anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine", noting particularly Hitchens' assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts should not be confirmed because of his faith.^[135]

Hitchens was raised nominally Christian, and went to Christian boarding schools but from an early age declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was of partially Jewish ancestry. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, who was then in her 90s, she said of his fiancée, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." Hitchens found out that his maternal grandmother, Dorothy Levin, was raised Jewish (Dorothy's father and maternal grandfather had both been born Jewish, and Dorothy's maternal grandmother â€“ Hitchens' matrilineal great-great-grandmother â€“ was a convert to Judaism). Hitchens' maternal grandfather converted to Judaism before marrying Dorothy Levin.^[138] Hitchens' Jewish-born ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland).^[139][140] In an article in the The Guardian on 14 April 2002, Hitchens stated that he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal.^[139] In a 2010 interview at New York Public Library, Hitchens stated that he was against circumcision, a Jewish tradition, and that he believed "if anyone wants to saw off bits of their genitalia they should do when they're grown up and have made the decision for themselves".^[141]

In February 2010, he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[142]

Personal life[link]

Hitchens after a talk at The College of New Jersey in March 2009

Marriages and children[link]

This section requires expansion.

Hitchens married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in a Greek Orthodox church^[18] in 1981; the couple had a son, Alexander and a daughter, Sophia. In 1989 Hitchens left Meleagrou for Carol Blue, an American writer.^[29] The couple married in New York, at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation. They have a daughter, Antonia.^[29]

Parents[link]

Hitchens' father, Eric Hitchens, was a Commander in the British Royal Navy. Hitchens often referred to his father as simply the 'Commander'. On 26th December, 1943, Hitchens's father was deployed onboard HMS Jamaica when it sank the German warship, the Scharnhorst. Christopher Hitchens would refer to his father's contribution to the war: 'Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done.' He also stated that 'the remark that most summed him [his father] up was the flat statement that the war of 1939 to 1945 had been "the only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing."' ^[143]

Hitchens's mother, Yvonne, died in Athens 1973 when, despite first reports in The Times that she had been murdered, it was later concluded that her death had been the result of an apparent suicide pact with her boyfriend, Reverend Timothy Bryan. Hitchens travelled to Athens to identify his mother's body. On the subject Hitchens later said: 'She probably thought things were getting sordid - he [Bryan] wasn't able to hold a job down, she couldn't go back, she was probably about the age I am now and perhaps there was that - she'd been very pretty - and things were never going to get any better, so why go through with it? She might not have been that hard to persuade, but I know that she did try to save herself because I have the photographs still. So that was sort of the end of family life really.' ^[144]

In reference to writing about his mother in his memoir, Hitch-22, he said, 'It was painful to write about my mother, but not very because long ago I internally managed all that. 'I even went back to Greece and I went to the graveyard while I was writing the book and decided not to write about it. I thought that would be sentimental.' ^[145]

Relationship with his younger brother[link]

Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian and socially conservative journalist in London, although, like his brother, he had been a Trotskyist in the 1970s. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London).^[146] Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew (born in 1999); shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said that their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on 21 June 2007 edition of the BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University,^[147] and at the Pew Forum on 12 October 2010.^[148]

Smoking and drinking[link]

The Sunday Times described Hitchens as "Usually armed with a glass of Scotch and an untipped Rothmans cigarette."^[149] In late 2007 he briefly gave up smoking, although resumed during the writing of his memoir and continued until his cancer diagnosis.^[150] Hitchens admitted to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", arguing that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."^[151] He argued, "The plain fact is that [drinking] makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring."^[152]

George Galloway notably accused Hitchens of being a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay",^[153] to which Hitchens replied, "only some of which is true".^[154] Hitchens later elaborated: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."^[155] Hitchens' wife Carol Blue described him as "obviously an alcoholic, he functions at a really high level and he doesn’t act like a drunk, so the only reason it’s a bad thing is it’s taking out his liver, presumably. It would be a drag for Henry Kissinger to live to a hundred and Christopher to keel over next year.� ^[156] His New Yorker profile described him as drinking "like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect."^[156]

Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"^[157]

In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' â€” ​most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there."^[158]

Reflecting on the lifestyle that supported his career as a writer he said:

I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle ... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored â€” it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I'm going to wager on this bit ... In a strange way I don't regret it. It's just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did.^[159]

Esophageal cancer and death[link]

Hitchens in 2010

In June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for Hitch-22 to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer.^[160] He announced that he was undergoing treatment in a Vanity Fair piece entitled "Topic of Cancer".^[39] Hitchens said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years".^[161] In November 2010, Hitchens canceled^[162] a scheduled appearance in New York, where he was to debate religion writers David Hazony and Stephen Prothero on the subject of the Ten Commandments. Earlier that year, he published a piece in Vanity Fair on the subject,^[163] and was working on a book about the Ten Commandments as well.^[164]

During his illness, Hitchens was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins' new cancer treatment which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.^[165][166]

In April 2011, Hitchens was forced to cancel an appearance at the American Atheist Convention, and instead sent a letter that stated, "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death." He closed with "And don't keep the faith."^[167] The letter also dismissed the notion of a possible deathbed conversion, in which he claimed that "redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before."^[167] In June 2011, he spoke to a University of Waterloo audience via a home video link.^[168]

In October 2011, Hitchens made a public appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, TX. Atheist Alliance of America was also a participant in the joint convention.^[169]

In November 2011, George Eaton wrote in the New Statesman:

The tragedy of Hitchens' illness is that it came at a time when he enjoyed a larger audience than ever. Of his tight circle of friends â€“ Amis, Fenton, McEwan, Rushdie â€“ Hitchens was the last to gain international renown, yet he is now read more widely than any of them." Eaton revealed that Hitchens would like to be remembered as a man who fought totalitarianism in all its forms although many remember him as a "lefty who turned right", and his support of the Iraq War and not his support of the War in Bosnia on the side of the Moslems. Eaton concluded, "The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but, as he is increasingly aware, perhaps not as he would like."^[170]

Hitchens died on 15 December 2011 at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.^[171]

In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research.^[172]

Reactions to death[link]

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was one of dozens of public figures to offer condolences and respect to Hitchens after his death from cancer

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, and unique character. He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment, and brilliance. He was an extraordinary, compelling and colourful human being whom it was a privilege to know."^[173]

Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and a friend of Hitchens, said, "I think he was one of the greatest orators of all time. He was a polymath, a wit, immensely knowledgeable, and a valiant fighter against all tyrants including imaginary supernatural ones."^[173]

Sam Harris, American writer and neuroscientist, wrote, "I have been privileged to witness the gratitude that so many people feel for Hitch’s life and work â€” for, wherever I speak, I meet his fans. On my last book tour, those who attended my lectures could not contain their delight at the mere mention of his name â€” and many of them came up to get their books signed primarily to request that I pass along their best wishes to him. It was wonderful to see how much Hitch was loved and admired â€” and to be able to share this with him before the end. I will miss you, brother."^[174]

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project who helped treat Hitchens' illness, wrote, "I will miss Christopher. I will miss the brilliant turn of phrase, the good-natured banter, the wry sideways smile when he was about to make a remark that would make me laugh out loud. No doubt he now knows the answer to the question of whether there is more to the spirit than just atoms and molecules. I hope he was surprised by the answer. I hope to hear him tell about it someday. He will tell it really well."^[175]

British columnist and author Peter Hitchens, who had a tumultuous relationship with his older brother Christopher, wrote that he and Christopher "got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens," and praised his brother as "courageous."^[176]

Irish-American political journalist Alexander Cockburn, founder of the left-wing^{[177][178][179]} political magazine CounterPunch wrote an obituary critical of Hitchens, criticizing his support for the Iraq War, criticisms of Mother Teresa, and criticisms of their mutual friend Edward Said and concluded, "I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol."^[180]

Tributes followed from the philosopher Daniel Dennett,^[181] the physicist Lawrence Krauss,^[182] the actor Stephen Fry,^[183] the writer Ian McEwan,^[184] the philosopher A.C. Grayling;^[185] and Vanity Fair, in which he was remembered as an "incomparable critic and masterful rhetorician".^[186]

Assessment[link]

Anthony Gottlieb argued in The New Yorker that Hitchens "thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it."^[187]

Jason Cowley argued in the Financial Times:

He is not a philosopher and has made no original contribution to intellectual thought. As an atheist, his anti-religious tract, God Is Not Great, is elegant but derivative. His polemical denunciations and pamphlets on powerful individuals, such as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, feel already dated, stranded in place and time, good journalism but not literature. Ultimately, I suspect, he will be remembered more for his prodigious output and for his swaggering, rhetorical style – as well as for his lifestyle: the louche cosmopolitan and gadfly, the itinerant man of letters and indefatigable raconteur.^[188]

Film and television appearances[link]

As referenced from the Internet Movie Database, Hitchens Web or Charlie Rose.^{[189][190][191]}

Selected publications[link]

References[link]

External links[link]