Left in the care of nannies, he wrote and performed his own plays, which, Francesca Segal wrote, “served the dual purpose of creating a cast of characters he cared about, and making the cast of his own life care more about him.” The son of a rabbi, Segal was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 16, 1937.Īccording to a 2008 essay by his daughter in Granta magazine, his early childhood was somewhat lonely: For the first six years of his life, he lived with his ailing grandmother and grandfather because his parents’ apartment building did not allow children. Segal taught at Princeton University, Dartmouth College and Brown University and was a visiting fellow at Wolfson College at Oxford University. He also wrote the academic tomes “Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus” (1987) and “The Death of Comedy” (2001). He produced eight more works of popular fiction, including “Oliver’s Story” (1977), “The Class” (1985) and “Doctors” (1987). Segal nonetheless continued to write, operating on two planes. The National Book Award for fiction that year went to Saul Bellow for “Mr. “It is a banal book which simply doesn’t qualify as literature,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and fiction jurist William Styron. His success unleashed “egotism bordering on megalomania,” as Segal said of himself, that helped set off a backlash: He was denied tenure at Yale and “Love Story” was ignominiously bounced from the nomination slate of the National Book Awards after the fiction jury threatened to resign. The sentimental romance provoked vales of tears and turned its author into a sensation practically overnight.

The most famous line, uttered early in the film by McGraw’s character and later by O’Neal’s character, was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?” Segal wrote in the first line of the 1970 novel about star-crossed lovers, played in the blockbuster 1970 movie by Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal.

Segal had Parkinson’s disease and died of a heart attack, his daughter, Francesca Segal, told the Associated Press.

Erich Segal, a Yale University classics professor whose first novel, the weepy “Love Story,” became a pop-culture phenomenon, selling more than 20 million copies in three dozen languages and spawning an iconic catchphrase of the 1970s, died Sunday in London.

Love Story by Erich Segal