SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher, and Sasha Abramsky. “Christopher Hitchens.” Progressive 61, no. 2 (February 1997): 32–36.

In the following interview, Hitchens discusses his education, formative experiences, his socialist perspective, contemporary political issues, his position on abortion, and his encounters with various notable people.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair and a freelance contributor to numerous other publications in both Britain and the United States. He is the author of a dozen books, covering issues as diverse as Britain's plundering of the Parthenon, the conflicts in the Middle East, Anglo-American relations, and the unsaintly qualities of Mother Teresa.

An Englishman by birth and upbringing, Hitchens came to America in the early 1980s, living first in New York City and then in Washington, D.C. In 1994, I was Hitchens's intern at The Nation. I discovered that we both went to the same college at Oxford—Balliol—and studied the same...