Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died 10 days before Christmas at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that had killed his father. His was a true life of the mind, and, in this respect, he towered over his contemporaries in Washington, New York, and London.

Christopher was a man of outsize appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact—and he wrote fast, frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, where he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch tumblers of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.

Christopher was one of the first writers I called when I came to Vanity Fair, in 1992. Six years before, I had asked him to write for Spy. That offer was ever so politely rejected. The Vanity Fair approach had a fee attached, though, and to my everlasting credit, he accepted and wrote for the magazine from then on—indeed, right up to the end. (His column “Charles Dickens’s Inner Child,” on page 70, is the last he wrote for us. He turned in the copy just three weeks before he died.) With the exception of Dominick Dunne, who died in 2009, no writer has been more associated with Vanity Fair.

There was no subject too big or too small for Christopher. Over the past two decades he traveled to just about every miserable hot spot you can think of. He’d also subject himself to any manner of humiliation or discomfort in the name of his column. I once sent him out on a mission to break the most niggling laws still on the books in New York City. One such decree forbade riding a bicycle with your feet off the pedals. The photograph that ran with the column, of Christopher sailing a small bike through Central Park with his legs in the air, looked like something out of the Moscow Circus. When he embarked on a cause of self-improvement for a three-part series, he subjected himself to myriad treatments to improve his dental area and other dark regions. At one point I suggested he go to a well-regarded waxing parlor in town for what they indelicately call the “sack, back, and crack.” He struggled to absorb the full meaning of this, but after a few seconds he smiled a nervous smile and said, “In for a penny . . . ”

Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he were writing to you and to you alone. And as a result, many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs. He was brave, and not just in facing the illness that took him; his courage flowed through his words and thought. He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom, his curious, pro-war stance before and after the invasion of Iraq being but one example. Friends distanced themselves from him during those unlit days. But he stuck to his guns. Earlier, after his rather famous 1995 attack on Mother Teresa in these pages, one of our contributing editors, a devout Catholic, came into the office banty with umbrage and announced that he was canceling his subscription. “You can’t cancel it,” I said. “You get the magazine for free!” Years ago, in the midst of the Clinton-impeachment uproar, Christopher had a very public dustup with his friend Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton White House functionary. The dispute was over which part of a conversation between them was or was not on the record. Christopher wound up on television a lot defending himself. He looked like hell, and I suggested we bring him to New York for a bit of a makeover and some R&R away from the cameras. The magazine was pretty flush back then, and we set him up with a new suit, shirts, ties, and such. When someone from the fashion department asked him what size his shoes were, he said he didn’t know—the pair he had on was borrowed.