Love Story over his Christmas break in 1969. But Erich insisted: “Trust me, they’ll laugh.” And they did. Yellow Submarine (1968) - where the imprint of the rabbi’s son was particularly evident in his mischievously inserted line: “Funny, you don’t look blue-ish”. Alongside his teaching, he had notched up several Hollywood screenwriting credits, including on the Beatles’ At Harvard, he co-authored the annual Hasty Pudding theatrical production. In his academic career, Erich taught Latin and Greek literature not only at Yale, but at Harvard and Princeton and, upon moving to London with his British wife in the 1980s, at Wolfson College, Oxford.īut he had always wanted to write. He left Harvard as class poet and “Latin salutary orator”, a twin honour equalled only by one other student, T.S. He was a classics professor at Yale University, having earned his master’s and Ph.D. When Erich wrote the book that changed his life, he was 32. But while it made him rich, the skewed fame that it brought him shouldered aside a litany of other accomplishments: as classics scholar and teacher, literary critic and sports commentator, essayist and scriptwriter, historian and practitioner of comedy.

The success he earned from his first novel and its Hollywood film adaptation would be accolade enough for most authors. Leaving readers crushed and teary-eyed might be enough for some - for Segal, it was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.The American writer Erich Segal, who died of a heart attack aged 72 on Sunday at his London home, will be best, and most misleadingly, remembered as the author of

He was a fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University, where a funeral was held today. But he was also a TV commentator a screenplay writer a professor of the classics a translator of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Just consider: In one of his incarnations, Segal was a writer with wide-ranging interests who took on, in the fictional arena, issues of death, dying and grief calibrated to appeal to a broad audience. But in comparison with Sparks’ stories, Segal’s have far more depth. For generations of readers, that novel/film has been synonymous with two words: ‘romance’ and ‘tragedy.’ (I can well remember my own relatives sitting around the kitchen table, asking one another, ‘Have you read it yet?’ and then sighing deeply and clutching their chests as they talked about it.) When you look at his many novels, Segal was in some ways the patriarch of a genre - call it ‘bereavement fiction’ - that today includes novelist Nicholas Sparks (whose weepy books dominate bestseller lists nationwide).

Erich segal novels