In the two decades since he came to the United States from Britain, Hitchens has been regarded as an exceptionally incisive, irreverent voice. His columns have appeared in both the star-struck glossy Vanity Fair and the leftist think magazine The Nation.

Hitchens is also the author of more than 10 books, including Why Orwell Matters, and his most recent, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. In his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, he writes, “Radicalism is humanism or it is nothing; the proper study of mankind is man and the ability to laugh is one of the faculties that defines the human and distinguishes the species from other animals.”

Hitchens, who has been called a thorn in the side of the American status quo, has shown increasing interest in alternatives to orthodox left-wing thinking, and his willingness to put his own principles ahead of politics has sometimes annoyed his ideological peers. When he contradicted testimony by a Clinton administration aide in the Monica Lewinsky affair, he was attacked in the pages of The Nation. Last year he severed his relationship with the magazine, for which he had written for two decades, after an ideological split over Iraq and the war on terror.

Hitchens is irrepressibly iconoclastic. In a Slate column headlined “Hopeless: Did Bob Hope Ever Say Anything Funny,” Hitchens wrote that “to be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is a serious drawback, even lapse, in a comedian.”

He is also known for some memorable television appearances. He challenged Charlton Heston on CNN to name the countries bordering Iraq. When Heston stumbled, criticizing Hitchens for wasting network time on “a high school geography lesson,” Hitchens replied: “Oh, keep your hairpiece on.”

For more information about the Millsaps Arts & Lecture Series, call Luran Buchanan at 601-974-1043 or buchall@millsaps.edu.

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