Erich Segal

Personal Info

Known For Writer

Gender Male

Birthday 1937-06-16

Deathday 2010-01-17 (72 years old)

Place of Birth Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA

Erich Segal

Biography

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 master's 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 Oliver's 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 CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Known For

Writer

2014
Masoom

as Original Story

1998
Only Love

as Novel

1983
Man, Woman and Child

as Screenplay

1983
Masoom

as Novel

1982
Olangal

as Novel

1980
A Change of Seasons

as Screenplay

1980
1978
Oliver's Story

as Screenplay

1978
1971
Jennifer on My Mind

as Screenplay

1970
Love Story

as Screenplay

1970
R.P.M.

as Writer

1970
The Games

as Screenplay

1968
Yellow Submarine

as Screenplay

Actor

1975
Apostrophes

as Self

1971
Jennifer on My Mind

as Gondolier (uncredited)

1971
Without Apparent Motive

as Hans Kleinberg

1968
The Dick Cavett Show

as Self - Guest

1965
Marathon

as Self