Erich Segal

 ( 1937 Births ) 

Although his family had since relocated from Brooklyn to a luxury Upper West Side apartment house on West End Avenue in Manhattan, he attended Midwood High School (approximately an hour away via the New York City Subway) in the former borough, likely due to its reputation as one of the few New York City public high schools of the era that consistently served as a feeder to Ivy League and Seven Sisters undergraduate institutions under the aegis of longtime guidance counselor Elizabeth Bradshaw. During his tenure at Midwood, he suffered a serious accident while canoeing. His coach advised him to jog as a part of his rehabilitation, which ended up becoming his lifelong avocation, enjoining 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 University.

His first academic book, (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, and early '70s 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."Obituaries: Erich Segal (1937–2010)". Wolfson College Record, 2010 , pages 29–32. 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.