Since then there have been two dramatic changes in his circumstances. The first was the international bestselling success of his 2007 anti-theist tomeGod is Not Great. After decades of acclaimed but essentially confined labour, Hitchens suddenly broke out to a mass audience, becoming arguably the global figurehead of the so-called New Atheists. Almost overnight he was upgraded from intellectual notoriety, as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, to the business end of mainstream fame. In America, in particular, he has reached that rare position for a journalist of becoming a news story himself.
Unfortunately the news, which provided the second personal transformation, was that in June he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, a malignancy whose survival ratings do not make soothing bedtime reading. As restraint is a quality for which neither Hitchens nor his critics are known, the ironies proved irresistible to many commentators. For the religiously zealous, the arch atheist suffering a mortal illness spoke of divine retribution – the unacknowledged irony being that belief in such a vindictive god served only to endorse Hitchens's thesis.
For more secular moralists, a different kind of cosmic accountancy was at work. The celebrated drinker and smoker who once claimed that "booze and fags are happiness" had succumbed to a cancer most often associated with drinking and smoking. Having previously gone so far as to promote the benefits of teenage smoking, he offered a public recantation of sorts. "I might as well say to anyone watching," he announced in a TV interview, "if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/christopher-hitchens-cancer-interview
