Erich Segal

last updated 8 January 2015

Erich Segal

1937–2010

The 1970 novel Love Story was a mixed blessing for its author, Erich Segal. The weeper about a preppy Harvard boy who abandons his privileged world to marry a working-class Radcliffe girl—who then dies of cancer—sold 4.3 million copies in paperback. It also became a blockbuster film with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, whose signature line—“Love means never having to say you’re sorry”—was a ’70s catchphrase. But Love Story also derailed Segal’s career in academia, and its success, he once remarked, “totally ruined me.”

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Segal’s childhood as the son of a Brooklyn rabbi was lonely. “For the first six years of his life,” said the Los Angeles Times, “he lived with his ailing grandmother and grandfather because his parents’ apartment building did not allow children.” Ignoring his father’s wish to follow in his footsteps, Segal graduated from Harvard as class poet and Latin salutatory orator—a dual honor equaled only by T.S. Eliot—and earned his doctorate in classics at Yale while teaching. “As a release from the academic grind, he co-wrote a musical comedy called Sing, Muse!, which ran off-Broadway for 39 performances.” The reviews got him film work, including a screenwriting credit for the 1968 Beatles movie Yellow Submarine. Then, over Christmas break in 1969, Segal wrote Love Story—first as a screenplay and then, on his agent’s advice, as a novel.

Segal’s “star-crossed” tale became a mammoth hit in a country weary of Vietnam, protests, and the counterculture, said The New York Times. The novel spent a year on the Times’ best-seller list; the movie earned almost $200 million and was credited with saving Paramount Studios. But “most reviewers harrumphed” at the unabashed sentimentality of both versions. “The banality of Love Story makes Peyton Place look like Swann’s Way,” wrote Newsweek. In 1971, when the novel was considered for a National Book Award, “the fiction jury threatened to resign in a body unless it was removed from contention. It was.”

Nonetheless, Segal became a celebrity, said The Washington Post. “He appeared on The Tonight Show four times in four weeks, was a judge at the Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.” At Yale, his classics lectures attracted hundreds of students; soon Segal was calling himself a “kind of a folk hero” and comparing himself to Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Yale eventually decided that his “extracurricular assignments were taking too much time away from his academic work and denied him tenure in 1972, a blow that took years to overcome.”

Segal eventually settled in England, where he became a fellow at Wolfson College of Oxford University. He published works of scholarship and several other novels, including the sequel Oliver’s Story. But although he would often speak of his heyday as “my little Camelot,” he also regretted his early success. “You think you’re invincible,” he said, “when in fact they’ll be looking for somebody else next week.” Segal died of a heart attack following years of Parkinson’s disease; survivors include his wife and two daughters.