On the tenth anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’ death, here’s my obituary in Taki’s Magazine:

Nature’s Tory
Steve Sailer

December 21, 2011

There wouldn’t seem to be much left to say about the late Christopher Hitchens after the countless tributes paid by other journalists about the night (or afternoon or morning) they got drunk with Hitch. Still, I want to call admiring attention to his taste in English literature.

Unable to boast of having downed a few with Hitchens myself, I tended to find much of his voluminous output over the last decade reminiscent of the legendary Private Eye reporter Phil Space. Yet in at least one venue, Hitchens demonstrated distinction. Just before 9/11, Benjamin Schwarz hired Hitchens to write a long monthly literary column for The Atlantic that showcased Hitchens’s combination of panache, pedantry, and lifelong conservatism. 

 The first four authors Hitchens profiled for The Atlantic were Anthony Powell, Winston Churchill, Kingsley Amis, and Rudyard Kipling: all of them English, right-of-center, and connected.

 While Hitchens’s notions on many subjects appeared to have been made up off the top of his head (Trotskyism! Islamofascism! Invade Iraq!), his favorite writers were sound as a pound. Hitchens affected being a man of the left, but he was one of nature’s Tories. His mother saw to the nurture. When his father fretted about public-school tuition, she declared, “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.”

Hitchens went on to write for The Atlantic about W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Philip Larkin, and Evelyn Waugh. In other words, Hitchens lauded the kind of writers who don’t intimidate journalists, which explains a bit about the disproportionate adulation he’s received in the press over the last week.

 Hitchens didn’t show much interest in avant-garde or academic books. Instead, he succored the media’s resentment of academia. The press doesn’t really like Ulysses, much less Finnegan’s Wake. They are bored by The Faerie Queene. What they truly enjoy is, say, Waugh’s Scoop, for which Hitchens wrote an introduction in 2000. Scoop is a superbly done 1938 send-up of foreign correspondents rushing to cover the Abyssinian War. Now that’s a classic. (Hey, I’ve read it eight or nine times.)

And Hitchens was there practically every month in The Atlantic to tell other journalists that the stuff they liked was great literature.