“The banality of ‘Love Story’ makes ‘Peyton Place’ look like ‘Swann’s Way’ as it skips from cliché to cliché with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a True Romance editor,” Newsweek wrote. While millions of readers swooned, most reviewers harrumphed.

And me.”) to what might easily be taken as comic (“ ‘Jenny, for Christ’s sake, how can I read John Stuart Mill when every single second I’m dying to make love to you?’ ”) The novel’s prose style ran from the telegraphic (“That she loved Mozart and Bach. Paramount urged him to release it as a novel first. According to many published accounts, his screenplay was rejected by several studios as too sentimental for the time. Segal first envisioned “Love Story” as a film. Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in “Love Story” (1970). He went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard. After graduating from Midwood High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where he had the distinction of being both class poet and class Latin orator. Segal also wrote “The Death of Comedy” (Harvard University, 2001), a well-received survey of Western comic drama from antiquity to modernity.Įrich Wolf Segal was born in Brooklyn on June 16, 1937, the son of Samuel Segal, a rabbi, and the former Cynthia Shapiro. Segal’s writing credits ranged from the screenplay for the animated Beatles movie “Yellow Submarine” (1968), on which he collaborated with several other writers to “Roman Laughter” (Harvard University, 1968), a study of the playwright Plautus that was widely considered seminal to the book and lyrics for “Sing Muse!” (1961), a musical version of the Helen of Troy story that ran for 39 performances Off Broadway.Īmong his other novels are “Oliver’s Story” (Harper & Row, 1977), which continues the tale of Oliver Barrett “The Class” (Bantam, 1985) “Doctors” (Bantam, 1988) “Acts of Faith” (Bantam, 1992) and “Only Love” (Putnam, 1997). Gore in the late 1960s, when they were students at Harvard and he was there on sabbatical.īefore “Love Story,” Mr. He did say that he had modeled Oliver’s freighted relationship with his father on the Gore family. Segal set the record straight: Oliver, he said, was mainly a youthful incarnation of the actor Tommy Lee Jones.

Love Story by Erich Segal