NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) – Actors Sean Penn and Stephen
Fry, novelist Salman Rushdie and dozens of other friends paid
tribute to Christopher Hitchens on Friday in a New York memorial
service held four months after his death.
Vanity Fair magazine, for which the British-born journalist
worked, said that popular songs of the 1960s and 1970s including
“Both Sides Now” and “Like a Rolling Stone” were played at the
service in the Great Hall of Cooper Union. A video of clips
highlighting his brash style and wit was also played.
Hitchens, an atheist and intellectual, wrote 25 books and
numerous articles and columns. He died in December at the age of
62 after a long and public battle with esophageal cancer.
“He was an editor’s dream, and he was a reader’s dream,”
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said.
Fry remarked that “one of the great pleasures of knowing
Christopher was having him disagree with you.” Francis Collins,
a friend and the director of the U.S. National Institutes of
Health, addressed Hitchen’s well-known atheism, which was
unshaken by his terminal cancer.
“No doubt he now knows the answer to whether there is more
to the spirit than nucleotides and neurotransmitters,” Collins
said.
Others at the memorial included British authors Ian McEwan
and Martin Amis, playwright Tom Stoppard, U.S. journalist Carl
Bernstein, actress Olivia Wilde, physicist Lawrence Krauss and
Hitchen’s wife Carol Blue, Vanity Fair said.
(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy)
