Writer Christopher Hitchens dies at age 62

— -- British-American writer Christopher Hitchens— the combative and caustic critic, intellectual, atheist and self-defined "conservative Marxist" — died Thursday at the age of 62 at a Texas hospital.

The cause of death was pneumonia, a complication of oesophageal cancer. He died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, surrounded by family and friends.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher."

The magazine's editor, Graydon Carter, described Hitchins as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar. Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

Hitchens disclosed in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer and would be "a very lucky person to live another five years." He continued to write even as he temporarily lost the use of his voice.

In an August essay for Vanity Fair, he wrote, "I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."

His passions included words, alcohol and cigarettes. He once wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was "enough to kill or stun the average mule."

A 2010 interview with USA TODAY was conducted on a New York sidewalk because Hitchens needed a cigarette. He said then he had given up smoking for two years but resumed as he was finishing his memoir, Hitch-22.

"I figured one cigarette isn't going to kill me, which is stupid," he said between puffs — shortly before he discovered he had cancer.

To those who urged Hitchens to embrace religion once he knew he was dying, he wrote:

"Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones.' People might suppose this was in poor taste."

Hitchens was a prolific writer, most recently for Vanity Fair. He was a sought-after TV talk combatant who appeared 13 times on Charlie Rose, six times on Real Time with Bill Maher, and four times on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

His books include God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), Why Orwell Matters (2002) and The Missionary Position (1995), a critique of Mother Teresa. His last book, Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, published in September, displayed his range, from the Iraq war to the merit of Vladimir Nabokov's fiction.

A final book by Hitchens, titled Mortality and based on his Vanity Fair essays, will be released early next year.

He delighted in defying simple labels and rejecting conventional wisdom: "In my life, the only certainty is to be uncertain," he said. "I'm an unbeliever who believes in skepticism. I'm only sure about being unsure."

His heroes included Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell and Thomas Paine. He wrote sharp critiques of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger.

He was often described as a former leftist, arrested as an student at Oxford for protesting the Vietnam War, who moved to the right, after supporting the war in Iraq in 2003.

But, he proudly proclaimed, "I'm a member of no (political) party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us."