Erich Segal

Erich Wolf Segal June 16 1937 January 17 2010 was an American author screenwriter educator and classicist who wrote the bestselling novel Love Story 1970 and its hit film adaptation Born and raised in a Jewish household in Brooklyn New York Segal was the first of three brothers His father was a rabbi and his mother was a homemaker His interest in writing and narrating stories developed as a child He went to Midwood High School during which he suffered a serious accident while canoeing His coach advised him to jog as a part of his rehabilitation which ended up becoming his passion and caused him to participate in the Boston Marathon more than 12 times He attended Harvard College graduating as both the class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958 and then obtained his masters degree in 1959 and a doctorate in 1965 in comparative literature from Harvard University after which he started teaching at Yale In 1967 through connections on Broadway Segal was given the opportunity to collaborate on the screenplay for the Beatles 1968 motion picture Yellow Submarine based on a story by Lee Minoff His first academic book Roman Laughter The Comedy of Plautus 1968 published by the Harvard University Press gave him considerable recognition and chronicled the great Roman comic playwright who inspired the Broadway hit A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 1962 In the late 1960s Segal collaborated on other screenplays He wrote a romantic story about a Harvard student and a Radcliffe student but failed to sell it Literary agent Lois Wallace at the William Morris Agency then suggested he turn the script into a novel and the result was Love Story 1970 A New York Times No 1 bestseller the book became the top selling work of fiction for 1970 in the United States and was translated into 33 languages worldwide The motion picture of the same name was the number one box office attraction of 1970 The novel proved problematic for Segal He acknowledged that its success unleashed egotism bordering on megalomania and he was denied tenure at Yale Moreover Love Story was ignominiously bounced from the nomination slate of the National Book Awards after the fiction jury threatened to resign Segal later said that the book totally ruined me He would go on to write more novels and screenplays including the 1977 sequel to Love Story titled Olivers Story Segal published scholarly works on Greek and Latin literature and taught Greek and Latin literature at Harvard Yale and Princeton universities He was a Supernumerary Fellow and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University He served as a visiting professor at Princeton the University of Munich and Dartmouth College His novel The Class 1985 a saga based on the Harvard Class of 1958 was a bestseller and won literary honors in France and Italy Doctors 1988 was another New York Times bestseller In 2001 he published a book on the history of theatre called The Death of Comedy Source Article Erich Segal from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30