“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. Nonetheless, Segal became a celebrity, said The Washington Post. 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. “The banality of Love Story makes Peyton Place look like Swann’s Way,” wrote Newsweek. But “most reviewers harrumphed” at the unabashed sentimentality of both versions.

The novel spent a year on the Times’ best-seller list the movie earned almost $200 million and was credited with saving Paramount Studios. Segal’s “star-crossed” tale became a mammoth hit in a country weary of Vietnam, protests, and the counterculture, said The New York Times. Then, over Christmas break in 1969, Segal wrote Love Story-first as a screenplay and then, on his agent’s advice, as a novel. “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. Eliot-and earned his doctorate in classics at Yale while teaching. “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. Segal’s childhood as the son of a Brooklyn rabbi was lonely. But Love Story also derailed Segal’s career in academia, and its success, he once remarked, “totally ruined me.” 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. 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.

The 1970 novel Love Story was a mixed blessing for its author, Erich Segal.

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