Erich Segal, 1938-2010
Erich Segal, best known as the author of the book Love Story, died Sunday of a heart attack. His funeral was today in London.
Image courtesy of the Telegraph
Few people know (I certainly didn’t) that Segal was a classics professor at Yale when he wrote Love Story. I, like many emotional teens, read, loved and wept over Love Story, and even briefly bought into its tag line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Obviously, he shouldn’t have been giving out relationship advice, but Love Story still stands as a romantic favorite for readers everywhere.
It was made into a movie in 1970 with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. Segal co-wrote the screenplay, and the movie was nominated for 7 Oscars.
O'Neal and MacGraw in 1970's Love Story
Segal had been struggling with Parkinson’s for 25 years. His daughter, Francesca, said in his Eulogy today, “That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last thirty years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was — a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know.”
A full list of his novels and works on the classics can be found here.
Rest in peace, Erich.
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